If you're a developer, you've probably come across the term "open source." If you've ever wondered what it's all about and how to contribute, you are in exactly the right place. By the end you would have understood what it means, gotten resources to help you get started and finally made your first contribution.
Now, if you're a new developer you are probably wondering what exactly is open source? How can you get started? What should you expect? Well, in this article we will cover all this and more.
What is Open-Source
Open source refers to source code that is made available to the public to view, use, modify, and distribute under a permissive license.
It's often in a company's or person's best interest to open-source their code, whether they're an individual, a corporation, a small business, a non-profit, or a government agency.
You do not need to know how to code in order to get started, OS contribution is in different forms like:
How to Contribute to Open Source
- You can add a description to a project's documentation to elaborate on a certain point
- You can give guidance on a specific project
- You can add examples to show how the code works
- You can write tutorials for the project
- You can add a translation for a project
- You can answer questions about a project (like on Stack Overflow or Reddit)
- You can offer to mentor another contributor
- You can fix typos and arrange the project's work folder correctly
Resources to help you get Started
Articles
- How to Contribute to Open Source Projects – A Beginner's Guide - A detailed article with in-depth explanation to help anybody trying to understand more about open-source community.
- Starting an Open Source Project - Tips on how to begin your own project and open-source it to the public.
- Introduction to GitHub and Open-Source Projects
- Building a Developer Profile using Open Source
Projects
- Hacktoberfest Projects - Choose from a list of more than 5000 HTML projects to contribute to.
- Python projects - A list of python projects, contribute to it by adding yours.
- Awesome Open-Source - Over 30,000 projects to choose from covering different topics.
- Awesome Hacktoberfest
Remember making your first contribution is easy and can be done in these steps:
- Fork the Repository
- Clone your forked repository
- Add your contribution
- Commit & Push
- Create a pull request
- Wait for Pull Request to merge
- Celebrate, your first step into the open Source World and contribute more
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