Opportunities in Open Source

Take Away Notes from my talk in January

3 min readJan 17, 2023

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I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the Mozilla Campus Club event on open source, where I shared my personal experience participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) program and discussed the various opportunities available for individuals to get involved in open source projects. I also provided tips and resources for those who are just starting out on their open source journey. It was a great experience interacting with the audience and discussing the importance of open source in the tech community. Here’s the summary of what we discussed

What even is it

In a very dry way, Open Source refers to a type of software whose source code is available to the public and can be freely used, modified, and distributed by anyone. This means that anyone can view and modify the source code of an open source project, as long as they follow the terms of the open source license.

An example of open source not often noticed is Chromium. It is an open-source web browser project developed by Google. It is the foundation for many popular web browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Opera. These browsers are built on top of Chromium and typically include additional features, such as proprietary extensions and plugins, as well as different user interfaces.

It’s worth noting that Chromium is not only used in web browsers but also in other areas such as embedded systems, mobile apps, and desktop apps.

Additionally, many compilers and programming tools are also open-source software. For example, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is a widely-used open-source compiler that supports multiple programming languages. Similarly, Clang and LLVM are open-source compilers used for C, C++, and other languages.

In fact, a significant portion of the software used in everyday computer science is open-source, and many developers, companies, and organizations rely on open-source software for their operations. Open-source software provides many benefits such as lower costs, flexibility, and community collaboration.

My Personal Experience

Honestly I’ve already talked about this at length before too. My Blog, “Starting with Open Source as a Complete Beginner” includes my experience from hacktoberfest, GSOC and my own project. It’s similar to what I talked about, and lacks just a few details.

If you’re particularly interested in GSOC, I would recommend “A Checklist for your GSOC Preparation”. Further, a small tip I don’t include there is to know when you’ve read enough of these blogs and actually start doing the work for it. Don’t waste too much time on it honestly, the best possible preparation you can do is to actually start.

That’s great and all, but how do I start?

I won’t bother with the long-ass paragraphs here so just have the list of events. There’s of course other ways, and for those I’ll refer you back to this.

“I can’t thank you enough, OP”

Sure you can, a follow and a comment would be a great way to start 😤