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Discussion on: Why you should think twice about contributing to Open Source

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jornh profile image
jornh • Edited

The percentage of people contributing also depends a lot on how the question was asked by those doing the survey. Regardless, I agree the interesting part is it’s growing over time.

Also, remember, contributions come in many forms - also non-code contributions are important! They can come in many forms:

  • f Fixing doc nits (when you misunderstand something, realize “why didn’t they explain it like this”, you can take the time to propose even just a small fix)

  • Participate in issue or forum discussions, to answer or clarify.

  • Heck, even just asking - good - questions. It feeds those who like to answer :-)

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rhamedy profile image
Rafiullah Hamedy

Thank you for sharing the other forms of contributions. I totally agree with you, asking and answering questions also counts as contribution.

When contributing to ElasticSearch, somebody made a pull request that I had some knowledge of based on an issue I worked on. I did a review of the pull request (you can check it out above) and provided the contributor some feedback that I knew the maintainer would give him anyway (the maintainer was thankful of the feedback - see github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/p...).

Providing feedback to a pull request in the form of code review (majority of repositories allow it) is another form of contribution. This helps both the contributor and maintainer.