Thoughts on Open Source

Yash Deshpande Written on June 29, 2024 3 min read

I am currently a part of GSSOC as a project admin and well here is my experience so far. I decided to participate in it, thinking I would interact with like minded individuals but this was far from the truth.

About GSSOC

GSSOC is a 3 month long open-source program where chosen contributors contribute to a few open-source projects. The ones who get the most pull requests gets prizes. Here, I applied to be a mentor for one such project, as that project had just one admin and managing the huge influx of PR’s and issues alone is a big task so mentors are introduced and also assigned with aiding them in the process. This is similar to Hacktoberfest.

About the Contributors

Many contributors as expected were contributing for the sake of it to get as many PR’s as possible. This meant more work for the admin and me. One time I had got 2-3 issues from the same guy all wanting to change the README or some markdown file that was not important. I naturally closed 2 of them and one was approved by the admin but the contributor somehow was too proud of this meager achievement and was boasting it on the 2 issues I had closed. I really wonder what goes on in their heads.

There were a few good ones too who were contributing to make actual difference and learn in this process and I was more than happy to help them in their issues. These were the people I was looking for.

My Perception of Open-Source

Here I will start to blabber on about my view of open-source. I open-source most of my code on my Github because I personally like to go through someones code to learn new ways of approaching certain problems. So I’d like to return that back to the community and hope that anyone actually reads my code and learns something new.

Coming to when should you contribute to open source

I use Cal.com a lot, its a great tool for scheduling my calls with a few clients. It also happens to be open source, so while using the app, if I encounter any issue or want a feature, I can make a issue and help them in bettering the software. This is both, good for them and me. This is how you open-source is what I feel. You use open-source apps, find genuine issues or features you want to add and help them fix it. Just to clarify, I don’t mean you have to create a PR to meaningfully contribute. Writing detailed and concise issues is of great help too.

Here in GSSOC what I found was, many people were making feature requests for features that weren’t really meaningful and helping the application get any better. The initiative and sentiment is great but the incentive aspect could be eliminated and it becomes a platform for open-source software to get help from contributors and mentors help those contributors learn and grow.