How to support an Open Source project

Anyone can support an Open Source Project including non-techies

Supporting an Open Source project can be as easy as tweeting that you are using the project. Yes that easy! Other supporting contributions can be just as easy with:

• Github: Star / Favourite the project - this gives the team moral support that their hard work is not going un-noticed and has the knock on effect for more contributors to support the project.

• Twitter: Tweeting, retweeting and following - similar to above, supporting the core team.

• Issues: Logging Issues that could be bugs, ideas, feedback, suggestions etc. Going a step further would be verifying the bug, how to replicate, what system etc.

• Donations: Financial donations, the majority of people using an Open Source project are less likely to do this and that is fine, as I believe most Open Source developers would rather have one of the above than a bit of extra change. Why, you may think? Because most Open Source contributors earn very well already, so they do not do this to top up their income, but to gain more experience and kudos in the community thus in the long term increasing their income.

• Pull Requests: This is what most people think about when talking abut Contributing to an Open Source project. Lets start at the beginning, what is a Pull Request? This a submitted proposal to make a change to the project source files. This usually includes documentation either in the main project repository or as a separate repository. The key point here is that documentation is a very useful contribution, probably more so that a code contribution. Because there are more people submitting code than documentation. So if you figure out how to use / configure a project that is not documented, please please, submit that back, even as bullet points (steps), as someone else can reformat it to match the current style.

Conclusion

Yes, even you can support an Open Source project...Start TODAY!