Hello,
This week I got to thinking ..
I have always been "afraid of" joining the Open Source community. I guess it's an old-fashioned fear of losing my ideas. That and the fact that working for Shell, Verity, Network Appliance, Telespazio and ESA, I am so used to working with secrets and exclusive IP ... I don't have any idea how to get involved.
Is there anyone who wants to give me advice? Your comments would be very welcome.
Thanks all .. I have a dataset, which I created in order to test my latest development, I think the community might find it useful ... Essentially its a synthetic "4 years in the life on an SME" .. 60k inter-related documents with a timeline and history.
I have to clean up some errors in the "Corporate DNA" definition, but when i get my head out of the big project, I will definitely tidy iy up and put it into circulation.
@Kevin_Salt perhaps start out in an area that feels less concerning? There are lots of low and no code areas that you can contribute to as a new contributor which all help open source projects and are really valuable.
That way it gives you a bit of time to decide if you feel comfortable with that project, and to find where your skills would be of most use.
It's definitely a different mindset coming from corporate worlds and it takes a bit of adjustment to default to open!
@Kevin_Salt
Hi,
I’ve been in a similar situation. Two important things to keep in mind: first, separate your work from personal projects. Definitely don’t share your employer’s intellectual property.
Second, and more importantly, be clear about why you want to share your work with the community. I thought about this a lot and realized it matters more to me that my work is useful, helps, or inspires others, rather than keeping things as “black boxes” and hoping to profit someday.
For me, the main goal of side projects is to learn something new. If they help someone, great. If not, they still served their purpose: I learned something new.
So if your goal is to learn, help, or inspire, go for open source. You don’t have to share everything—that’s up to you.
That’s just my perspective on open source and evening side projects. You might find a different (maybe better) path. Hope this was at least a bit inspiring 🙂
Check your employment contracts? some companies might want to claim your off hours work too.
Which might mean you need some approval from a a manager.
There's also talking your company into releasing something. I remember stumbling on an open sourced language server protocol project written by palantir. So even secretive defense contractors might approve releasing some projects.
Otherwise I'd go with the do something off hours not related to your main work that you think would be fun.
@alienghic Thanks Diane, I don't have a problem with employment, I'm self employed and a pensioner. My issues are more about 1. understanding the process and 2. Being able to manage and moderate a project if it becomes popular.
I guess the only way to start is to start .. so my 60,000 document, simulated company, dataset and generation code looks like a suitable candidate
Oh ok!
Larger projects will have some how to contribute documentation.
As a pretty formal example here's how to contribute to python.
Smaller projects will have some kind of issue tracker, email list, or something and there you just say hi, I found a bug and here's my idea how to fix it.
Also some projects have a tag for beginner friendly issues.
then you and the maintainers talk about it and they decide if they want to accept it, or you might have to bug them a few times because everyone is too busy.
(This is where i often get stuck, I tend to wait too long)
it's good form to start with smaller patches that are easy to understand.
A big problem with the LLMs is the like generating giant many thousand line patches that are difficult to understand.
Kevin Salt
Ruth Cheesley (she/her)
Mortylen
Diane