Being An Open Source Developer:

setup

The first issue to deal with here is, why do it if I’m not going to be paid.
This one is pretty easy to answer, if less easy for everyone to accept - Future Job Prospects.
Students generally have a harder time finding jobs than people with more experience.
Universities do have schemes to help you get initial roles, but what you need is that evidence of competence people already in the workforce are more easily able to demonstrate.

When you apply for a job, or even register your CV with an agency, your online presence will start to receive constant attention.
If you’re a developer, this attention will focus on any code repositories you either own, or have your name associated with (hence, if we’ve already done the lecture on Mozilla, why I said to use your real name).
From the first year you should have been developing an online portfolio.
While you may not have considered it to be terribly important initially, by now I would hope you’ll be more aware how important it is to have an online brand. Simply sending out applications no longer suffices.

By most current definitions, as in those determined by commercial or critical success, most Open Source (we use this as a blanket term to include Free Software too) projects end in failure.
Many don’t even reach completion, but sometimes completion is a difficult thing to judge, as Open Source programs, even widely used ones, can remain in beta for years.
Therefore any analysis of reasons for failure can be difficult perform. This 2017 paper makes an attempt, but still fails to be clear in my opinion.

The reality of failure is more complex. Sometimes developers move on because they have a better idea, but leave the old project up. This is what I’ve done.
Sometimes they just upload old code from long finished projects with no intention of taking them any further.
This makes more code available to the community, but further skews any analysis of project failure analysis.
Still, high failure rate is sometimes used as justification to claim that it’s not such a good thing to start in this area.

This option is often lacking for large commercial companies who feel the need to demand visible progress along previously known paths for their staff, often stifling the chances for true innovation as a result for all but a fortunate few.
This isn’t always true of course, but it happens often enough that people can be left frustrated with their jobs, resulting in what’s known in many fields as Burn Out, a catch all phrase with several meanings.

There is a large community of developers, and while it used to be dominated by programmers during the days of Free Software, it’s now expanded, since the Open Source Initiative grew the Community, and Lawrence Lessig created the Creative Commons Licence, to include artists, architects, designers, engineers, writers and others I’ve not mentioned.
Basically if you create something you think could be improved by being shared, the Open Source community is the place to be.

There are now groups interested in Open Source work who meet to discuss new developments in the community
At present so far as I’m aware the most common method used to arrange these is the Meetup Site.
While not dedicated solely at Open Source. This site allows for easy creation of groups and for those groups to meet either online or in person.
It would be nice if the site were itself an Open Source project, but for the moment no Open Source equivalent exists.

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Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International by Dr Carey Pridgeon 2016
(Licence does not cover linked images owned by other content creators)