Is it really tough to get in the Open Source

It’s not tough to get into open source.

It is very easy to start, all you need basic programming skills, for example as if you know how to check a number is prime or not, you are good. Most of the organisations use git to maintain their projects, so you also need to know about git that is quite easy. You just google how to use git you get a lots of sources for learning git.

You can start by solving a simple bug or writing a single line of code.

There are a lot of people to help you every time you got stuck from installing a package to solving your first bug.

Contributing to open source is learning by doing mechanism you try things, you stuck some where, you need help, some body helps you, you got unstuck, this cycle repeats over and over. That’s how open source contribution works.

It is improving your level of contribution which takes time and some more work, I won’t say tough. If you use such minor changes to learn the workflow so that you can contribute better and help to make a really good open source software.

If you don’t want to write code you can also contribute to documentation part because documentation is equally valuable to writing code, a good documentation makes a project better.

What are some good projects to contribute?

You can find many projects according to your skill set. My suggestion is to look into previous year Google summer of code projects so you can find what kind of projects are there that you might be interested and Subscribe to the mailing lists of one of these projects and try to build the project from source. and ping on the mailing list for any kind of help to that project and they instruct you how to proceed. Check the bug trackers for things that are not very interesting but need fixing anyway. Then prepare a patch and try to upstream it (the method depends on the project).

As you work on the little things you will slowly gain a better understanding of how the code base is organised and how you could contribute more significant changes.

Lots of people solve lots of problems and build large number of open source projects and make a better open source community.

For more information you can read:

1. https://www.quora.com/topic/Open-Source-Projects
2. https://www.quora.com/topic/Open-Source
3. https://opensource.googleblog.com/