The Recent Social Media Outrage
Off late, I witnessed a rise in the videos complaining about the poor quality of Pull Requests that are being submitted. India has been getting a lot of heat since most of these not-so-required pull requests originate here.
Should Indians Contribute To Open Source - Harikirat Singh
Don’t Contribute to Open Source - Theo t3.gg
Before I go on about the reason and explaining the issues, I want to say that I in no way say that all PRs from India are bad, absolutely not. India has a strong Open Source community, and its contributions are very prominent. I myself am a member in most of these communities and run Bangalore’s largest student-led FOSS community (MUKTI). So I’m not blaming the problem on any individual country or persons at all. I find the view of open source that exists today among at least the students to be somewhat misleading.
What Open Source Contributions have boiled down to
Nowadays, Open Source contributions are seen as a means of achieving 2 main goals:
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Winning Swags by participating in events like the HacktoberFest
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To be able to put up “Open Source Contributor” on their resumes to help get a job
I personally know a lot of people who make bad quality PRs that consist Grammar corrections for the documentation, Needless Commenting for code and tag a lot of maintainers.
This makes the life of the project maintainers hell and defeats the whole purpose for contributing to opensource.
Congrats folks, we just made “open source contribution” a race too. I have been saying this for long, don’t just mindlessly contribute, add value. Build your own open source projects, work on them for at least 6-8 months.
— Hitesh Choudhary (@Hiteshdotcom) January 19, 2024
Soon PR will be like course completion certificate 😌
☕️ pic.twitter.com/zPCpcToQLH
Open Source events like the GSoC have been reduced to mere competetions that help you secure a job.
Where has the spirit of OpenSource gone and how we can we rekindle it?
Coming to the Indian Open Source scene, it’s nessecary to accept the fact that there has been a spike in the Pull Requests which are non-sensical just to win some damn t-shirt and have no value-addition.
These PRs cause a lot of clutter and overshadow those requests that actually have something meaningful to add.
In reality, Hacktoberfest is a corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community. ~domenic
The incentives and perks that come along with contributing to open source is what people tend to focus on rather than the spirit and the philosophy itself.
The Cart has been placed pefore the horse ~ Theo
So, how do we fix this?
Well, let’s not make this a rat race.
Our contributions should be those that add value and actually introduce new features or fix bugs.
I would go one step further and say, as Indians we have such a large population that is skilled so - Why not develop Open Source projects instead of just contributing?
Heck, develop apps and project in the public domain! We need more quality projects than contributions. I’m not denying that contributions are not important. They are an integral part of the Open Source cycle but that’s not the only damn thing out there.
Once we have these Quality open source apps we can increase awareness further and organically increase the number of FOSS users!
“We need more Open Source users otherwise these projects have no meaning.”
There are tons of problems to solve from making Linux packages to serve as alternatives to the Windows drivers for devices to other FOSS alternatives to mainstream proprietary apps.
Conclusion
(Source: @arthurflorette)
Let’s correct our wrongs and also guide those who we know engage in these practises. It’s time we moved on from such petty reasons and helped projects by adding great value! Let’s create more FOSS projects in the open domain which solve problems and not just pile up on repetative themes.
Thank you, Jai Hind!
P.S Here is a shoutout to the Made-In-India collection of GitHub where you can start by improving these ongoing projects by adding value.