We are currently in an age where a large portion of open source apps are actively maintained, users understand more about open source than ever before and open source software is almost as good, if not better, than their proprietary counterparts.

This is just a huge thank you to anyone and everyone involved in the making and maintaining of open source software.

As a regular tester, I do my best to provide any feedback I can to make your vision come to fruition.

  • CameronDev@programming.dev
    28·
    2 years ago

    Big reporters/Testers deserve some props as well. Testing the code on a variety of different situations is how software gets stable, and I can’t do that myself. And properly and concisely describing a bug or glitch is usually the key to getting it resolved quickly.

    • severien@lemmy.world
      13·
      2 years ago

      And properly and concisely describing a bug or glitch is usually the key to getting it resolved quickly.

      Often the most difficult part of solving it is being able to reproduce it / find the exact situation in which the problem occurs.

    • ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      2 years ago

      Indeed. The people who are active testers are people I respect immensely.

      I use custom ROMs on my devices and it always surprised me, just how much people help out. It’s really really amazing.

  • sasquash471@feddit.de
    12·
    2 years ago

    I propose to declare one day a year as Open Source Day. Something like the Sysadmin-day. It’s about time that the open source contributors finally get the recognition they deserve.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
    8·
    2 years ago

    As an open-source developer and maintainer (and as someone about to open-source another project) and tester too, you’re welcome :)

    I enjoy writing and maintaining open-source, it’s fun for others to be able to download and play around with the sources.

    • Spiritreader@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 years ago

      Being a maintainer / project owner is not always fun, but it’s rewarding in a sense that you’re able to offer something useful to others.

      I don’t like providing free support via github issues. And that’s usually what happens, you don’t get many developers that put care into bug reports. Instead it’s mostly users that don’t really understand, sometimes entitled, sometimes really nice but completely wrong.

      However I really appreciate those that do care or at least follow the template and make an effort.

      I see issues as a form of a necessity to help the software improve, but I’ve chosen to no longer pay too much attention to it because it’s just draining.

      Support is draining, and I respect everyone who does it, those who provide support for free even moreso.

  • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    Not everybody can code, so donors giving their hard earned cash also deserve credit, some projects (for example godot ) can hire multiple full time people due to it, and that can include jobs that don’t get a lot of open source contributors like UX people.

    • ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      2 years ago

      Godot is insane. Blender too! These projects make me feel a sense of pride in our community that I don’t really qualify to feel, but these people keep making me feel it anyway.

      Well done yo!

        • ElPussyKangaroo@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          2 years ago

          Yes!

          There’s this new video editor I saw someone working on. Olive or something I think.

          Really amazing progress!

          Same with Natron, the FOSS Video Compositing Software, like After Effects.

          Plus plus, Penpot, the Figma alternative. I’m waiting for the desktop app.

          I’m so pumped for the future of Open Source Projects. 🎉🫠🎉🫠

  • mortrek@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    I agree. I’m very grateful to OSS developers. I use almost exclusively OSS software every day at this point, and it wouldn’t be possible without the countless people devoting countless hours of their valuable time to these projects.

    So, a question to devs, especially for smaller, more approachable projects: I have a minor (plus a bit more) in CS, a lifetime of casual coding, but never really built anything larger-scale than a C-based sh-like shell in one of my CS courses, or many years ago an IRC front-end for a chatbot engine. Mostly I just write scripts (sometimes kinda complex), or small C/C++ projects. I would try to contribute to a project directly, but I don’t want to step on toes, and most projects have people who are deeply intertwined in the code of the project. It feels impossible to get involved in any way other than testing without possibly just annoying people who have been doing it for years. I’ve known enough intimidating grizzled *nix guru people to make me paranoid that I’ll just get in the way.

    How do you get a foothold in a project? Should I just start with creating my own OSS project, and once I get somewhere where I’m familiar with the flow and project management and such, then I can consider contributing more to other projects?

    Or is it really more helpful to the community to just test stuff, create documentation, answer questions, etc? Would becoming another dev be more helpful to OSS, or would working on supporting projects in these other ways be more helpful?