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Articles tagged with open source

Give back to the community

In our latest client project, we make use of at least 20 open source projects, from our beloved Rails, to great testing frameworks like RSpec, to plugins like Paperclip, to server-side software like Passenger, and many more. While we are appreciative of the hard work that goes into creating those projects for the first 2 seconds after we find them, we often take these libraries for granted.

As a small development company, we need any advantage we can get. It is the vibrant open source ecosystem that gives us a competitive advantage against the big guns. And not only do we benefit from the work of the community, our clients get more sophisticated software that costs less. Everyone wins.

Every project we get paid to write makes extensive use of open source software. We try to do our part to contribute back to the community, but our contributions definitely aren’t worth what we get out of the community. So we’ve come up with an idea…

At Collective Idea, any time we use an open source library in a project, we’re going to make a $10 donation on behalf of our client to that project. For our client, the cost is small: a couple hundred dollars in exchange for thousands of dollars worth of savings and better software.

We encourage you to do the same.

Project Maintainers

If you maintain a project on GitHub, do yourself a favor and make it easier for us to donate. GitHub lets you add your PayPal account to the project so all we have to do is click a button.

Code: open source Jan 09, 2009 ● updated Jan 12, 2009 ● 8 comments

Acknowledge contributions

If you have ever released useful code into the open source wilderness, then you know that at some point, you get patches or contributions that are well-intentioned but don’t quite meet your standards. Either the quality is not what it should be or they use a different style than the one you prefer. Often people make contributions that you just don’t want to incorporate, but If the contribution is valuable, there are two ways of going about resolving this.

On large projects, or when you’re just too busy, you give the original contributor some feedback as to what you’d like to see changed and ask them to re-submit it. But other times, you just fix it yourself. When going this route, it’s tempting to discard the original contribution, simply taking the intent and redoing it.

I’m guilty of this. But by failing to acknowledge their hard work, you remove their motivation to contribute to your projects. So, honor the original author’s effort by accepting the original contribution, and make your desired changes on top of that.

Update: from Brian Ryckbost:

Code: open source Jan 08, 2009 ● updated Jan 09, 2009 ● 2 comments

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