Open source offers many advantages for both software developers and development companies, generating impact and recognition. In fact, it is an excellent means of professional growth and a good way to explore new technologies and solutions that are generating development trends and new job opportunities every day.

It also brings together communities of people who share common needs, ranging from libraries and tools to entire ecosystems and operating systems. For industry, it promotes the use and positioning of its solutions, providing new opportunities for growth and the generation of new business models. Below, we’ll explain what it is, what it entails, and how you can get involved in Open Source.

1. What is Open Source?

In short, open source software is software with no restrictions on modifying, downloading, or distributing its source code. This, in turn, is different from free software, which means that the software product can be used freely, not free of charge.

This, in turn, involves many other elements, such as:

  • Reliance on the community itself for quality assurance and for finding new problems and solutions for specific sectors or individuals.
  • Decentralization and community collaboration in building the source code.
  • Transparency in accessing and modifying the source code.

2. What are the advantages of getting involved in Open Source projects?

Both industries and individuals can benefit from participating in open source projects. Below, we’ll illustrate some advantages and considerations for supporting open source projects.

2.1. For companies

  • Positioning: Companies’ positioning can be improved thanks to Open Source projects. Why is this? Primarily due to the use and level of activity of a community around the maintenance of a software solution.
  • Incursion into business models: Large companies such as IBM, RedHat, Canonical, Google, Nokia, among others, are committed to the use of free technologies, offering solutions around their products or forks of Open Source solutions with enhanced features, such as some of the methods for incursion into business models.
  • Cost savings: Due to the self-management of Open Source solutions, companies can see cost savings, both in troubleshooting software issues and in coding these solutions.

2.2. Para personas

  • Professional expertise: This is undoubtedly one of the greatest advantages of getting involved in the development of Open Source software projects. Within the communities, there are people of all skill levels who aspire to contribute something. For this, there are issues for all levels, and even repositories that are solely responsible for collecting projects to which it is possible to contribute, such as the Awesome for Beginners repository or the First timers only blog, which offer help and opportunities to contribute solutions.
  • Recognition: With sufficient experience and commitment, it is possible to achieve recognition within a specific community, whether by achieving expertise in a solution, programming language, or tool.
  • Contacts: By being involved in Open Source project developments, it is possible to find opportunities in companies or make contacts with influential people in a market area or niche, so it can be an opportunity to gain visibility, with the proper effort and experience of course.

3. ¿Que desventajas tiene involucrarse en proyectos de Open Source?

And of course, as expected, being involved has its own disadvantages, which we will mention below:

3.1. For companies

  • Security and maintenance: If the information contained in the repositories is not properly controlled, forks can pose a serious security problem, such as access to private keys, shared repositories of sensitive information, verification of other developments in the Open Source solution, among others.
  • High added value: There must be a broad differentiation between the Open Source solution and its proprietary version or the services surrounding this tool in order to be considered a profitable, or at least maintainable, solution.

3.2. For people

  • High levels of effort: Software development can often be extensive and demanding for contributors. Solutions are generally not easy to implement, especially when the system is very large and even less so when there is no active community around these solutions.
  • Little or no financial compensation: If the solution you propose does not have high added value, has very obvious errors, or is a very easy or difficult solution to implement, it is very likely that you will not be able to obtain financial compensation.

4. How to contribute?

If you’re new to the topic, we recommend starting with existing projects to learn how to collaborate in Open Source teams.

4.1. If they are existing projects

Typically, software projects that have a large community around them have a markup language file called CONTRIBUTING or CONTRIBUTING.md that tells people who want to support free initiatives how they should do so.

If you’re new to Git, start by learning how to maintain basic change control using Git. This includes concepts such as branches, commits, server-side changes, and pull requests. Then, find documentation tasks you can contribute to.

If you have a slightly more advanced level in project structure and documentation, you can start by delving deeper into Git, more specifically with the standard branch management model known as Git flow, preferably the full version that supports, apart from the well-known master and develop branches, the feature, release, hotfix and bugfix branches and when necessary, creating one.

4.2. If they are new projects

You need to analyze what you want to do, what audience you want to reach, and what problems you want to solve. If you have these three things clear, you can make an impact. Here’s an example:

I was working on a server-side PDF rendering solution in Symfony 3. However, checking out Packagist which is the most famous solutions repository for bundle support in Composer / Symfony / Laravel, it was easy to notice that there wasn’t a very sophisticated solution to this problem, and to make matters worse, it was running Symfony 2 and was using a very outdated version of PDF.js, plus it didn’t have security support, such as preventing the pdf from being downloaded, and that, when the pdf was finished rendering on the client, the document would be deleted.

All these features and more are embedded in this solution, so if you want to provide solutions, it is necessary to find opportunities for improvement to achieve useful, problem-specific and highly specialized developments so that you present good added value and stand out from other solutions.

1. Conclusions

It’s possible to get involved in open source developments because they offer strong professional advantages and, if properly leveraged, can represent a good business model. As expected, it’s not a perfect solution or system. But it brings with it benefits that are far greater and more numerous than the disadvantages it may represent. So yes, it’s worth getting involved in open source projects, as they provide great knowledge with reusable solutions to common problems in software development.

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1. References

[1]. What is open source?