Do you contribute?

[ My translation of the previous article by Raphael ]
I do not know about you, but when I first started using free software, I was amazed that I could use all these programs for free. And after a few months I decided to find a way to repay something. That was 13 years ago ... and until today I am still an active Debian developer :-)

At that time, I was a real newbie in the Linux world (and still a student). My first contribution to open source software was limited to the creation of a Debian package for Sympa , a mailing list manager written by people I knew and respected.

A few months later, a person from Debian called me, responsible for bringing in new maintainer packages. We discussed my motivation to participate in the project, and he wondered if I really shared the ideas of the Debian Social Contract, (of course, I shared and still share: I always found this document very inspiring). That was enough to give me the status of a Debian developer .

And it all started ... I got the opportunity to do even more work of different kinds! Then I just started learning Perl for Windows and hoped that I could improve my knowledge of the language by adopting several orphaned packages written in Perl. I did this for 2-3 packages and fixed all the bugs in them.
')
All this time I have been learning, communicating with smart people in several Debian mailings. Since I was mainly engaged in correcting errors and improving the quality of programs, I quickly found a place in the QA team , which at that time was led by another French guy.

Striving for technical excellence has become increasingly difficult as Debian grew and developed. Our team needed a tool that would quickly assess the status of any package. And so I created the Package Tracking System (package tracking system).

I will finish my story at this place, it already covers 4 years of my life in a very condensed form (if you want to learn more, look here ).

I do not suggest you follow my path. I already was a programmer when I became acquainted with Linux (although only under Windows on Delphi, Visual Basic and a little on Perl), and from that time the situation has seriously changed. It is unlikely that your experience will coincide with mine. I just want to say that you should consider yourself part of the Free Software community, and that you can (and should) help him within your means. Report bugs, advertise Ubuntu among your friends, write documentation, create packages for new programs, or answer user questions — anything you can help.

Surely you will find something to your liking. And you will continue to do this, because people will thank you for your work. You will love the feeling that you are doing something that is useful to millions of people around the world ... even if it is a trifle. Do you know how much time you save with a small improvement? 115 days.

About the author : Rafael Herzog is a Debian developer. He is working on a package manager (dpkg) and is looking for user support to be able to devote at least a third of his time to Debian.