I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Everyone can view the source of something that calls itself "open source", but there's no guarantee you'll be able to run it or modify it. Some companies release the source to part of their project but not enough to build it yourself.
Some open source projects are fairly tightly controlled by their leaders, who will only accept suggested changes from people they know.
Ignoring those outliers, yes, anyone can contribute to open source. You don't have to have reached some threshold of experience or anything.
Most projects will have a web page or a file in the source code that gives you an idea of how they expect to receive contributions. It varies, because anyone is free to make whatever code they like and maintain it however they like.
You're likely to find large projects (think OpenOffice, etc.) very difficult to get to grips with, because the code requires a lot of "domain knowledge". Your best bet for getting started is to help out with smaller projects that do something you're already interested in. You don't need to start by jumping into code; you can help out with bug reports or translations or even something as simple and hands-off as a suggestion or two.
Finally, there are lots of threads here on DEV about finding projects to work on.
Hi Killian.
Everyone can view the source of something that calls itself "open source", but there's no guarantee you'll be able to run it or modify it. Some companies release the source to part of their project but not enough to build it yourself.
Some open source projects are fairly tightly controlled by their leaders, who will only accept suggested changes from people they know.
Ignoring those outliers, yes, anyone can contribute to open source. You don't have to have reached some threshold of experience or anything.
Most projects will have a web page or a file in the source code that gives you an idea of how they expect to receive contributions. It varies, because anyone is free to make whatever code they like and maintain it however they like.
You're likely to find large projects (think OpenOffice, etc.) very difficult to get to grips with, because the code requires a lot of "domain knowledge". Your best bet for getting started is to help out with smaller projects that do something you're already interested in. You don't need to start by jumping into code; you can help out with bug reports or translations or even something as simple and hands-off as a suggestion or two.
Finally, there are lots of threads here on DEV about finding projects to work on.
Thank you very much for your answer!
My vision of what "open source" means is now clearer.
I am relatively new here, I will search trough older posts to find projects to work on.