Why contribute to Open-Source?
I am sure this is a common question for many people and this is obvious also. Why does one need to contribute to Open-Source? I mean, like you do your full-time job and why there is a need to spend extra hours in something which is not giving you anything in return.
In this post, I will share my experiences around Open-Source Contributions, mostly around Drupal. I promise this will be a short post to read.
I would like to begin with disagreement on what I wrote in the first paragraph about not getting something in return. There are a lot of things you get in return for contributions. Well, this post was originally meant to list these items only. But I feel I can slip in some additional information as well.
I have been in the Drupal world for 6+ years now. I would like to share a few things I received recently (in the past couple of months) because of the contributions I made to Open-Source(Drupal) which I am extremely grateful for.
I also am grateful for my employer, QED42, which encourages a culture of Open-Source contribution. The atmosphere around grooming new contributors and mentorship opportunities really helps one in their respective journey into the Open-Source world.
Scholarship to attend DrupalCon Global 2020
This event was a 100% & first-ever virtual Drupal event. The experience of DrupalCon is something unique. I can write an entire blog post about this(I’m thinking about this). All thanks to Drupal India Association who found me fit for this event and nominated my name for the scholarship. I’m really grateful for the opportunity given. Despite it being an online event, spanning 3 days and for me, the event was in the night time, yet I enjoyed it a lot. 🙇🏻♂️
Scholarships can be costly, and for this particular event, the ticket was around $249. And with this, you get access to the content of the highest quality, get to network with a lot of people, get mentored by some amazing folks, ask a question to Dries(Drupal project lead), Show off your pets, etc. etc.
Scholarships are a common thing in DrupalCon and in major Open-Source conferences. This information can mostly be found on the event website. We can always watch that space for a scholarship.
Check out the next DrupalCon which is happening in Barcelona, Spain: https://events.drupal.org/barcelona2020
Free Membership for Drupalize.me
Drupalize.me (https://drupalize.me/) is a portal which has (IMO) the best Drupal training material available. The courses can range from an absolute beginner to advanced levels. If you want to learn about Drupal or prepare for Acquia Certification. Then this is a great library to have.
These services cost around $35/month, I got the membership for like 6 months, which is HUGE. I am extremely thankful for the Drupalize.me team for providing this. 🙌
So, if you are active on Drupal then go to https://drupalize.me/blog/201705/free-memberships-drupal-8-project-maintainers to avail free membership for Drupalize.me library.
Free License for PhpStorm IDE
Again the incredible support showed by the JetBrains team for Drupal. They support the Drupal project in a unique way :
JetBrains is offering any contributor on Drupal.org with more than 35 contribution credits in the past year a free PhpStorm license.
Thus, I applied for this offer and the JetBrains team happily provided me with a personal license for 1 year, which again is like $199.00 per year. Yet again, I am extremely grateful for this. 🙏🏼
As you can see, Open-Source has a lot of things to offer to us as contributors. Whatever you are contributing, I’m sure you will get something in return. I’ve just shared a few of the monetary equalized things which I was able to avail in the past few months, just because I made some contributions to Open-Source(in my case, Drupal).
Apart from this, you get to learn a LOT while you are contributing to Open-Source. You talk with new people, make friends, learn about new cultures, you grow professionally, you grow as a person, You help others grow too, You understand the software better technically, etc. there are many things more.
But this is not the best part,
The best part according to me is, when you contribute, you are making the software better, secure and more usable.
The impact of our contributions to any open-source project is huge. We might not realize this, but Open-source is essentially surviving because of the general human instinct to make something meaningful and available to everyone to use freely.
Thus, even if you make a tiny contribution and you feel your contribution is not significant, believe me, you are already part of a greater community and doing awesome.
With this, I really hope, you find a tiny motivation to contribute to Open-Source. 🙏🏼
Thank you so much for reading this till the last.
Feel free to reach out to me or connect with me on Twitter for any kind of feedback around this blog or anything in general: https://twitter.com/JayKandari
or Checkout my Drupal.org Profile: https://www.drupal.org/u/jaykandari
Thanks again!! See you soon. 👋
