Re: [Fsfe-uk] Contributing to Free Software (new revision)

[Chris Croughton]

On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 11:36:19PM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote:

> I've attached an updated copy of the document.  It's not yet complete,
> I've not fully proof-read it, and I've not checked it's factually
> correct.  However, I've fleshed out most of the sections and added
> Chris's suggestions.

Note for people reading it who aren't familiar with [gnt]roff -- it uses
tables so you need to add the -t flag to groff to see them, making the
command line

  groff -t -ms -T utf8 <file> | less

(-T ascii or -T ps as appropriate).

Some proff-raednig stuff:

  * Section 2: "but given that the vast majority" would be better IMO as
    "but since the vast majority" ("given that" has an implication of
    "this is obvious", someone new to FS culture might however not know
    it; using 'since' makes it into an assertion "believe me, this is
    true and therefore this follows").  I'm still not quite convinced
    that the following "there are many other ways" /does/ follow.  How
    about a re-write of the paragraph?

      Money is useful, but since the vast majority of Free Software
      developers are volunteers who work on it in their free time it may
      not always be the most useful way of contributing.  There are many
      other ways of contributing, some of which are suggested below.

  * Para 2.1, 'projects' should be singular, or 'an' before 'existing'
    should be dropped.

    Incidentally, I suspect that creating new software is more popular
    with developers than maintaining other people's buggy and
    badly-written (in the opinion of the maintainer, of course <g>)
    code.

    The first subsection, starting "Get a copy", is very specific
    (tarballs, CVS, release branches etc.) and likely to confuse new
    developers not familiar with them (not all Free Software is *ix, and
    not all uses those tools).  I would put it (and the third subsection
    about patches) at the end as advice to developers themselves.  I
    think that they don't really fit with the style and level of the
    rest of the suggestions, perhaps leave them out altogether?

  * Ironically, in section 2.5 "Proof-reading and correcting
    documentation" you have a typo!  Unless this is deliberate,
    "reporting and typos" should say "any typos".

  * 2.10 -- I'm sure I've seen somewhere (a newsgroup FAQ?) comments
    about advocacy and when it it and is not a good thing.  If anyone
    can find it...

> Any suggestions for more ways of contributiong would be welcome.  What
> I'd really like are real-life examples of companies or organisations
> who have contributed in each of the ways.  I'd especially like
> examples of small to medium UK companies, to show that you don't have
> to be big to contribute.  Examples of competing companies
> collaborating on Free Software projects to their mutual benefit would
> be nice, too.

Apple, Symbian, and many others have contributed to the Doxygen project
(which is GPL), see http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/supporters.html

Chris C