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.
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
Diane