Fame & Fortune from Open Source

Robert Couprobert.coup@koordinates.com

http://rob.coup.net.nz/

Run-down

• Who am I?

• What is Open Source? Who uses it?

• Why get involved?

• How to get started?

• How do the projects work?

• Fame & fortune

Rob

• Founder & CTO of Koordinates

• making geospatial data more accessible

• One Track Mind

• Navman

• UoA business school

• BE (Computer Systems)& BCom (Operations Mgmt)

Rob

• Been involved as an OSS user for 8 years

• Contributing significantly for the past two years

• Mainly: Dojo, Django, Geospatial apps

• Google Summer of Code organiser

What is Open Source?

• a community of people collaborating to create software

Who uses it?

• everyone

• developers, out of their own self-interest

• “We make muck so you don’t have to”Jeff Bezos, Amazon

OSS in Organisations

• use OSS

• develop with OSS (“muck”)

• use OSS as key technology

• support & develop OSS

Who develops it?

• always individuals

• people paid to work WITH it

• people paid to work ON it

• orgs who founded the software

• orgs who formed around the software

• people who aren’t paid at all

Why get involved?

• a product you work with and care about

• you want stuff fixed or added or improved

• help thy neighbour

• interesting & challenging

• fun!

How can you contribute?

• support

• documentation

• design

• opinions

• triage

• testing

• demos/examples

• moderating

• evangelising

• website

• infrastructure

• events/programmes

• code

How to get started?

• Actions speak louder than words

• Non-code contributions are critical

• What are you capable of?

• What are you interested in?

Starting points

• Mailing lists & forums

• File & triage bug reports

• Test pre-releases

• Write examples & demos

GHOP

• pre-University students

• 995 tasks across 10 projects

• 378 students

• 10 weeks

• pick up a task and do it

Silverstripe @ GHOP

• 62 students

• 173 completed tasks

6%

code33%

26%

7%2%1%

13%

12%

translation outreachtraining researchdocs user interfacecode quality assurance

Summer of Code

• University students

• 3 years:1500 students, 2000 mentors, 90 countries

• 2008:1125 students,175 projects

• May - August

Summer of Code

• “Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers”

• Challenging for projects & students

GSoC @ Dojo

• 6 projects

• 2 mentors

• dedicated admin

• weekly meetings

• mailing lists & forums

• meetups

• blog posts

• high profile

• get people using it

How OSS works

• Different for every project

BDFL

Steering Committee

Contributors

Community

Committers

Barriers

• You need to earn respect

• People aren’t scary

• You are good enough

Commitment

• This is voluntary

• People come and go

• Commitments change

Fame?

• projects fit into communities

• articles, blog posts, demos

• conferences

• ohloh.net

Can this pay me?

• Companies around the software

• creator

• offering support

• Companies who use the project

• Freelance

• Ping the developers list

Outcomes

• Get involved

• It’s easier than you expect

• Have fun :)

• Opportunities for students & graduates

• Online mapping

• Python, Javascript, C/C++

• distributed systems

• open source

• robert.coup@koordinates.com