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Patches-welcome.md (3511B)

    

  1. ---
  2. date: 2019-01-01
  3. layout: post
  4. title: Patches welcome
  5. tags: ["philosophy", "free software"]
  6. ---
  8. Happy new year! This is always a weird "holiday" for me, since all of the fun
  9. happened last night. Today is just kind of... I guess a chance for everyone to
  10. sober up before work tomorrow? It does tend to invite a sense of reflection and
  11. is the ideal time to plan for the year ahead. One of my goals in 2019 is to
  12. change more people's thinking about the open source community and what it means
  13. to count among their number.
  15. I think there's a certain mode of thinking which lends itself to a more
  16. productive free software community and a happier free software contributor. Free
  17. software is not *theirs* - it's *ours*. Linux doesn't belong to Linus Torvalds.
  18. Firefox doesn't belong to Mozilla, vim doesn't belong to Bram Moolenaar, and
  19. ffmpeg doesn't belong to Fabrice Bellard. These projects belong to everyone.
  20. That includes you! In this way, we reap the benefits of open source, but we also
  21. shoulder the responsibilities. I'm not referring to some abstract sense of
  22. reponsibility, but the tangible ones, like fixing bugs or developing new
  23. features.
  25. One of the great things about this community is how easy it is to release your
  26. software under a FOSS license. You have no obligations to the software once it's
  27. released, except the obligations you hold yourself to (i.e. "if this software
  28. makes my computer work, and I want to use my computer, I need to keep this
  29. software in good working order"). It's important for users to remember that
  30. they're not entitled to anything other than the rights laid out in the license,
  31. too. You're not entitled to bug fixes or new features - you're *empowered* by
  32. free software to make those changes yourself.
  34. Sometimes, when working on sway, someone says something like "oh, it's a bug in
  35. libwayland". My response is generally along the lines of "I guess you're writing
  36. a libwayland patch then!" The goal hasn't changed, only the route. It's no
  37. different from being in the weeds and realizing you need to do some refactoring
  38. first. If a problem in some FOSS project, be it a bug or a conspicuously missing
  39. feature, is in the way of your goals, it's *your problem*.  A friend of mine
  40. recently said of a missing feature in a project they have nothing to do with:
  41. "adding FreeBSD 12 support is not yet done, but it's on my todo list." I thought
  42. that perfectly embodied the right way to think about FOSS.
  44. When applying this philosophy, you may occasionally have to deal with an
  45. absentee maintainer or a big old pile of legacy spaghetti code. Fork it! Rewrite
  46. it! These are tough marbles but they're the marbles you've gotta deal with. It's
  47. not as hard as it looks.
  49. The entire world of free software is your oyster. Nothing is off-limits: if it's
  50. FOSS, you can work on it. Try not to be intimidated by unknown programming
  51. languages, unfamiliar codebases, or a lack of time. You'll pick up the new
  52. language sooner than you think[^1], all projects are similar enough when you get
  53. down to it, and small amounts of work done infrequently adds up over a long
  54. enough time period.  FOSS doesn't have to move quickly, it just has to keep
  55. moving. The Dawn spacecraft accelerated at 0.003 cm/s<sup>2</sup> and made it to
  56. [another world][ceres][^2].
  58. [ceres]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/PIA19547-Ceres-DwarfPlanet-Dawn-RC3-AnimationFrame25-20150504.jpg
  60. [^1]: Especially if you have a reason to learn it, like this bug you need to fix
  61. [^2]: Actually, it visited 3.