The Beauty of Open Source Software
By: Jeremy Cheng
Tags: Open Source, Contribution, Linux, Perspective

The Beauty of Open Source Software

My super tiny contribution to Geary, an open source mail client marked in red.

Since that rainy Seattle day back in the 90’s when my classmate showed me a Slackware Linux machine built from scrap parts running squid which he had setup to improve web browsing for the whole entire computer lab of Windows and Apple workstations, I have been fascinated with Open Source software. My first reaction was what? It’s FREE? What?! It’s built by a community of people from around the world? How cool is that?!

From that day onward, I progressively did more and more as a user of Linux and open source software but never did I think once, I was perhaps good enough or had anything interesting to offer in terms of building these very same software that I was using on a daily basis since I was not much of a developer and the amazingly talented people around me were simply so much more capable than me in building things from scratch. As a result, I went off for many years as a systems integrator/engineer implementing open source software that other people built; something that I was very good at. Perhaps you can say I had become an evangelist or cheerleader of open source solutions.

Over the years, I deployed systems comprised of open source software for all sizes; solutions as small as for early stage startups all the way to fortune 100 enterprises and government agencies. Through all this experience, I progressively grew my technical depth and understanding of what it took to build good software. This is when I realized that I was totally wrong all along. I started realizing that amazing developers are only part of the equation. Building good software requires a lot of relatively less experienced developers, translators, testers, project managers/coordinators, and marketers too.

Upon this epiphany, I started looking more and more into how I could contribute and started throwing myself out there to participate. I began to build small tools around existing open source software to enhance the user experience and then later on also made a number of super small contributions to larger projects as well.

However, my story is not the point of this post. The main point is, if someone like myself who’s extremely far from an amazing developer can make contributions to the Open Source community, anyone can. In fact, you don’t even have to be technical. You could be contributing to projects in many non-technical ways like testing, translation, and marketing/PR. It also doesn’t have to take a lot of your time. My contribution to Geary is a perfect example. All I did was add the “Detach the composer” shortcut to the shortcut manual (see image at the top of this post) which was identified to be missing and low on priority to fix by the main developers. This contribution is laughably small but yet, if you imagine a million of Jeremy’s adding one small contribution each, that’s a lot of contribution and can potentially make a powerful impact to an existing piece of software. On top of that, as a contributor, you will always enjoy the perk of grazing through certain components of a piece of software that you use on a daily basis and think to yourself, hey, that’s what I worked on! It’s there because I helped put it there.

This is why I think Open Source software is beautiful.