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Reasons to contribute

  • Why do people contribute to open source projects?

  • What is the motivation of people to contribute to open source projects?

  • That is the job.

  • Want to fix a bug / add a feature to something that the person uses.

  • Hope for better employment opportunities.

  • Project that used by the company has a bug, needs a feature, needs documentation, tests.

  • You want to learn something new. Doing it is the best way to learn it.

  • For fun.

You use an open source product, e.g. Firefox, VLC, WordPress, or Moodle. There is a bug that annoys you or a feature you really want to have. On one hand the promise of Open Source is that you can make those changes both technically as you have access to the source code and legally as you have the proper licenses. On the other hand these are large and very complex applications and are probably written in a programming language that you are not familiar with.

How to contribute to a large, established Open Source project?

I think we can assume that there are no simple bugs or simple missing features in large established project. What they are