The 10 unspoken rules of open source communities
Tue, 04/26/2011 - 22:41 — rj
- Don't be a help vampire on the support foums. Answer at least 20 questions before you ask your own (IMHO, 20:1 is a good ratio).
- Respect is earned through three things: giving back to the community (code, forum support, financial), the number of digits in your user ID (less is better), and attending conferences/meetups.
- Real OSSers use Ubuntu or Mac, MS is just accepted.
- OSS is about community and relationships with people.
- Don't talk business or sound like you're talking business. We're here for the community.
- All the important news in the world you ever need to know and discuss is on Slashdot. XKCD is a good reference point for humor.
- Generally speaking, closed source is bad, software patents are bad, and copyright law is...meh. Institutions considered Evil (tm) include RIAA/MPAA, Microsoft, Apple, and Google, pretty much in that order.
- A liberal arts degree is pretty much useless.
- Don't complain about how the software works unless you're committed to making the change yourself and have the code to prove it. See point #4 above for imporant advice on making code changes.
- Respect the maintainer(s).
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