I’ve spent a reasonably long time with computers. I’ve been doing something with either software or hardware (mostly software) for pretty close to three quarters of my current lifespan. I started when I was about 10, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) nobody was paying me for my work yet then. Flash forwards a few decades, and I have a gig I rather enjoy with SUSE, working on storage stuff.
OK, “yay Tim”. Enough of the backstory, what’s the point?
The point (if I can ball up my years of experience, and the experience of the world at large), is that, in aggregate, we write better software if we do it in the open. There’s a whole Free Software vs. Open Source thing, and the nuances of that discussion are interesting and definitely important, but to my mind this is all rather less interesting than the mechanics of how F/OSS projects actually work in practice. In particular, given that projects are essentially communities, and communities are made up of individuals, how does an individual join an existing project, and become accepted and confident in that space?