Open Source made me the man I am

http://cubiq.org/open-source-made-me-the-man-i-am

by rolandboon • 13 years ago

205 50 13 years ago

cubiq.org

CodeGlitch3• 13 years ago

Great article. I have only just started my own opensource projects (this year) and find it so much more satisfying.

borplk• 13 years ago

if you don't mind what is your project? just curious

CodeGlitch3• 13 years ago

One of them is a security-camera system for Raspberry Pis, the other is me just messing around writing an artificial-lifeform type thing in Python.

Nether are ready for any kind of public exposure just yet ;) hackernews will be the 1st to know about it when I do though!

Cheers

orenbarzilai2• 13 years ago

Good article. If you looking for an idea for your next article I would love to know how you publish your open source code, how you introduce your projects to the first developers? any interesting hack there? or simple post in HN is enough?

cubiq2• 13 years ago

I'm the author of the original article. I actually haven't posted it on HN and it was a pleasant surprise.

I believe the best way to "promote" yourself is by being active in your community. Connect with other developers, discuss on forums, groups, g+, etc...

Just logging in to push your open source project is pretty useless and quite lame. You have to be believable and you need to gain the trust of your community first. It's a long process but it pays back.

derekp72• 13 years ago

What if you have an open source project for which you can't easily find a community? For example, I've got what I feel is a fairly good backup utility as an upgrade for people using rsync snapshot backups. But it would feel improper to mention it on any rsync backup tool mailing list (as it technically competes with these tools).

The only thing I can think of is to make packages for various distributions and see if they want to include it. But I'd like to get a bit more testing and feedback first, with maybe a couple dozen users before going mainstream.

jjoe• 13 years ago

Perhaps it made him a "better" programmer but claiming to have made him a better "man" is a bit exaggerated.

I guess he's super excited about how far he's come and how programming helped him attain a certain level of satisfaction and happiness in his professional life.

themodelplumber• 13 years ago

OSS probably made me a humbler developer, too. I know what it means patching even small portions of code and I’m less harsh when posting bugs on others’ repositories.

That's definitely going to spill over into his day-to-day life, looking at my own experience. And such behavior does make you a better person.

jaggederest• 13 years ago

Personally I can't see a path forward for me from high school till now without open source.

I own a home, stock, work a great job, have gotten to travel the world, and do exactly what I want to do for a job. Purely as a result of having the tools and instructional material I needed available libre on the internet.

I can't help but think that without that kind of alternative, dropping out of college would have sunk me for life - I'd probably still be working odd jobs in my hometown and living with my parents, no career, no future, depressed. I could even imagine an alternate present where I had enlisted in the military and gotten deployed.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

Using and/or contributing to open-source software also means that you help society use its resources in a more economic and intelligent way:

You can invest the resulting savings in projects which will in turn advance society.

Also in this sense you become "a better man".

qwerta2• 13 years ago

I am bootstraping startup which will turn my long time hobby OS project into full-time job. I am almost always tired, cranky and my social life sucks. I think it is safe to say, I would be better man with normal hobby and 9-5 job.

Tyrannosaurs• 13 years ago

That's the pressure of a start up rather than the specifics of the project though isn't it?

Going it alone and giving up the security of a steady pay check is going to be hard whether you're setting up a software company or a sandwich shop.

I suspect for every entrepreneur blogging about how being self employed has given them a great work life balance, I suspect there are 20 in the same position as you. It could be that you're not suited to the life but, more likely I suspect, it's just part and parcel of the early stages of setting out on your own.

qwerta2• 13 years ago

No pressure, I have long runway and dozens of job offers to fallback to. And I just turned profitable.

This is not a rant, I love what I am doing and freedom it brings. I just want to point out that being OS nerd, does not always line up with being "better man".

MarcusVorenus• 13 years ago

You'd be better off but not the better man. The better man endures the pain of doing the right thing.

jimmaswell• 13 years ago

Why is it "doing the right thing" working at a startup that's statistically unlikely to go anywhere rather than working at an established company that's more likely to provide value to society?

madoublet• 13 years ago

I can echo a lot of what the author is saying. While I have seen less financial success, my project (respondcms.com, if interested) has taught me a lot about writing code, designing UI, and dealing with complexity. I am definitely a better developer for doing it, and at the end of the day, it is definitely a good feeling when someone finds value in what you are doing.

sidcool• 13 years ago

I m an open source contributor. But my contri has been small. Any tips how I can improve it?

iamwil• 13 years ago

Start with documentation. And learn how to read other people's code.

sovande• 13 years ago

Does a few weekend projects on GitHub and blogging about it really count as "developing open source software"? Isn't this more like using the Open Source term to promote oneself? Compared to guys like Igor Sysoev churning away year after year working on nginx and _not_ using time to blog about it.

orenbarzilai2• 13 years ago

imho if people are using your project you did good! and a lot of ppl are using iScroll.

krapp• 13 years ago

Does a few weekend projects on GitHub and blogging about it really count as "developing open source software"?

Yes.

TheLegace• 13 years ago

Definitely. I spent a lot of time at looking at code for microcontroller projects, Arduinos, AVR, STM32. For some people with experience they may take a weekend or two, but for someone who learns by reading code it's the building blocks of your career and success(or future success in my case ;).

CodeGlitch3• 13 years ago

I think it does, yes.

freyrs3• 13 years ago

Any time you slap a open source license on some code and make it public you're doing open source. So yes.

jbrooksuk2• 13 years ago

I write open source code — some stuff I'm tidying up before I release, since I just whack it on GitHub unusable for the 99% — but don't have much exposure? I have plugins built for Sublime Text which have around 4k downloads.

http://github.com/jbrooksuk

derekp72• 13 years ago

How do you track your number of downloads on Github?

jbrooksuk2• 13 years ago

Ah, I don't. All of my Sublime packages are in Package Control, so I can check the downloads through wbonds site; https://sublime.wbond.net/browse/authors/jbrooksuk

munchor• 13 years ago

I contribute to some FOSS projects with hundreds of thousands of downloads and it's healthy from several points of view.

On the one hand, I made some great "online" friends and feel great as I write code that I know people will use and appreciate. On the other hand, I've learnt so much and I know that some of the skills I've acquired during these years will help me when I'm old enough to get a job and start "actually" working. I feel like I can also say Open Source will make the man I will be.

To me, it's amazing how I can sit back in my desk and shape projects being developed and used by people from all over the world. I rarely have time to think about the awesomeness in that, but when I do I always feel so fulfilled.

conformal• 13 years ago

open source ftw =)

leviathan• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the time I used to contribute to the enlightenment project. e17 was still not released, and very rough around the edges, I had commit access, so I wrote a theme selector app and put it in the repo, it eventually got picked up and included with the default installation of e17. Was the best feeling at the time to have something you wrote used by people all around the world.

Of course the project then moved on and my code was replaced.

simplify2• 13 years ago

Open source is one of those rare times when "build it and they will come" holds true. I built a testing gem for stripe, and with zero marketing I've had eight complete strangers come in and make useful contributions through the magic of github. Open source is truly fascinating.

adamonduty• 13 years ago

Link to your stripe testing gem?

simplify2• 13 years ago

https://github.com/rebelidealist/stripe-ruby-mock

lowmagnet• 13 years ago

I only have one project[1], but the communications from its users (always constructive or requests for information) makes me proud of the way it makes the average Java Selenium user's life easier.

[1] https://github.com/elisarver/selophane

jmgutn• 13 years ago

Open source is definitely the most amazing philosophy on software development.

Recently a guy at Facebook recruiting staff contacted me by email for a position inside the company saying that they liked what I've been building and publishing as open source.

I'd highly recommend to everyone that contributes with open source to attach their github/bitbucket/googlecode/etc accounts on their resumes.

I'm doing exactly that on my linkedin summary and it helped me a lot to introduce myself. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/juan-manuel-garc%C3%ADa/29/4a5/2...

rhc2104• 13 years ago

Cool. Stories like this are why I'm building a marketplace for freelance programmers that have contributed to open source.

Of course, it's open source- https://github.com/CodeDoor/codedoor

known• 13 years ago

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." --Isaac Newton

nrmn• 13 years ago

I feel a little apprehensive about sharing my code online, Im not sure if its an ego thing or from seeing some of the rude comments people have made over twitter about X pull request being made on github. Am I just being silly about this?

kylemaxwell2• 13 years ago

Not "silly" per se, but I think that concern is overblown. I write bad code and release all of it that I can, because we don't get better in a vacuum. Also, what's terrible code to you is likely highly useful to somebody else.

b0ti2• 13 years ago

It's nice to hear about such success stories. Unfortunately most OSS projects never gain such a user base to be able to make a living off of it. I'm currently evaluating changing the license of our GPL-ed software to use something more restrictive or even dropping OSS and make it freeware only without providing sources. Read these emails if you want to know why: http://www.mail-archive.com/nxlog-ce-users@lists.sourceforge... http://www.mail-archive.com/nxlog-ce-users@lists.sourceforge...

Let me know if you have some advice.

thinkersilver• 13 years ago

Log aggregation and analytics is a hot space at the moment and in all fairness I think that you are being taken advantage of. I've read the messages and you are under no obligation to provide free support for source code and you shouldn't be bullied into doing so. In my eyes you have gone far enough in providing the source and binaries.

I think your biggest problem isn't your licensing but the documentation and the site itself. Since I work in the same space for a commercial product similar to Splunk, I'd like to offer a few comments.

1. It needs to be clear what the difference is between the enterprise and the open source version. Features and support must be clear with the enterprise version.

2. The message has to be clear for the target audience. Your product is very developer focused, but you have many support use cases. Focus on making it easy for non technical (non dev) people to get started monitoring the most popular pieces of infrastructure. A few getting started or how to guides for popular web servers and databases is a good start.

3. You may also need to cripple the functionality of your product (for the free version). Perhaps cripple it based on scale. The number of agents that can be deployed in an env can be restricted. Don't do what splunk do a disable based on data volume.

4. There are no images on your site. I can't visualize how I would instrument my infrastructure for log collection. This is vital.

I haven't used nxlog but this was my first impression. I hope the comments help in some way.

belorn• 13 years ago

While reading the emails, I do want to correct one thing.

The author to a copyrighted work are not obligated by the choice of license. GPL and other copyright licenses give people other than the copyright holder a licence to do things that they don't have under regular copyright law. The copyright holder however has full rights regardless of license.

The only exception is false advertisement laws, but those are quite narrow in definition, and might not matter much for non-paying customers. A paying customer would have a case however.

nl• 13 years ago

My advice would be to setup a paid support arm ASAP, and tell the person complaining they have two options:

1) Log a bug against the windows build process, and you'll look at it when it reaches the top of your priority list, or

2) Engage you for paid support to investigate the issue.

You are under no obligation to make your softwear buildable on any platform. If he chooses to disagree,he can refuse your license, delete your software and move on.

b0ti2• 13 years ago

Paid support is already there. There is a "support" menu on the webpage, the issue tracker has a polite note saying that this is available. Some people have been contacted directly in email to see whether they'd be interested.

For example some users at a big Taiwanese laptop maker company were after windows2000(!) support. When they were politely offered support saying "please decide whether paid support would be of interest or not", the response was "ok, thank you for your information but when can you fix the bug?". I could give countless other similar examples.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestions. I'll heed the advice and will change the website to make this more clear for those who are only after the free labor.

ScottBurson• 13 years ago

Chris Main wrote to you:

   However, if you do choose to release your software under GPL or LGPL you also
   place yourself under an obligation to provide build instructions. This is not
   what I say, it is what the GPL/LGPL themselves say.

This is wrong. Section 4 of the compliance guide, from which Mr. Main proceeds to quote, is directed towards those distributing GPL software written by other people. The GPL does not place any such constraints on the author(s). If you want to distribute Windows binaries, and don't want to bother explaining how to build nxlog on Windows, you are completely within your rights. If Mr. Main cannot figure out how to build it on Windows, he is simply unable to distribute a modified version that runs on Windows (since the GPL would require him to explain how he did so), and you are not obliged to lift a finger about that.

jnazario• 13 years ago

"two weeks ago i couldn't spell open source, now i am one!" (kidding)

but seriously, open source certainly helped make me the person i am, as well. by working on open source projects, i got my first gig (in a field i'm not professionally trained in, either), and i have been fortunate to have been surrounded by generous, bright people who i have always tried to learn from.

my own story is why i recommend to people to get involved in open source projects in their learning.

mark_l_watson• 13 years ago

I liked that, and open source has similarly helped my career over the decades (I write this wearing a FSF tee shirt :-)

One warning to the author: he might be more careful about posting his rate for specific customers. I am also contracting at Google and my contract says that remuneration is confidential.

cubiq2• 13 years ago

thanks for the heads-up. My standard hourly rate is public (you can find it in the "hire me" section too), long term hires are then discussed on a per project basis. I actually didn't disclose how much they spent :)

danbmil99• 13 years ago

Open Source has been berry, berry good to me! (Anyone else old enough to catch the reference?)

It's really an amazing social phenomenon, something unexpected and unique, that seems to go against the grain, or at least usefully counter, the market-driven, proprietary, DRM, locked-in, control-freak sensibility that is so prominent today in mainstream high tech.

Open Source made me the man I am

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