Why I love Open Source.

Most people who don’t contribute to any OS project, just don’t get it!

Identity.

OS is a way to express yourself. Place for showing your way of thinking, your level of knowledge, your style. OS can be one of your identities.

Community.

OS is a way to communicate with like minded people on specific topics. Its a society with all positive and negative things included.

School.

OS is a way to learn how to code (or do other things) and how to not to. In OS world every one can be a teacher and influence what people do and how people think. Its sometimes just fun, sometimes you learn things while you are trying to teach. You can play “teacher” and just ask questions. Somebody will raise a hand and give you an answer. The amazing thing is that the answers are sometimes so unexpected. You get directions to think of you would never come to alone.

Startup.

OS project puts you into position of being the CEO of this “product”. It makes you feel important (implied it has users). If you want it to be popular, you need to find your channels to promote it, speak on conferences, integrate other projects, write documentation, explain it properly. Even a fancy landing page seems to be very effective.

Github stars, amount of downloads are the KPI’s of your project. You are the brand. I saw projects with shitty code base and thousands of stars. I saw high quality projects with few stars. Famous people get hundreds of stars on any project they publish, even if the idea is not really good. So pretty much like a startup ☺

Responsibility.

OS is sometimes a big responsibility. It puts you into position, just by pushing a change set, to decide whether your project will break hundreds or thousands of others people projects. Your commit can save other people weeks or months of work or it can cost other people days or weeks to fix something you broke. It can be also a big amount of work to maintain it. Often you fix bugs you never had or add features you never needed.

Dangerous.

OS can be also a dangerous place. Some people like to punish other people. They even might make you feel very small and stupid. But its like in the real live. I personally LOVE when somebody proves me stupid. Understanding of being stupid automatically makes me better. The alternative is not helpful!

Summary.

So it looks like OS is very much like real live. Sometimes you are God, sometimes slave, teacher, visionary, gawker, child, father, testpilot or mad scientist.

I want to thank github for making all this things accessible to us.

Best, OS