50 lines of C, Stat

This week, I had to begin reading a book about the crumbling open source infrastructure tha most of the modern world is currently relying on. (I have written some form of that sentence several times now and it doesn’t feel like english anymore). After reading half of it, I do believe that there is a pretty big and growing problem. According to the author, less people are contributing to the commons while more people continually build new products off of what already is struggling to stay up to date. These new products may or may not be free. It seems like we’re in dire need of a way to get people more involved with open source.

Initially, I was thinking of whether it would be useful to incentivise people to contribute to open source projects. I’m not sure where the money would come from, it would probably have to be from either the government, or donations to an organization put together to handle payments. Already, I began to see that this is probably a bad idea. Things can get sketchy when a large governing body handles the financials and support for a bunch of smaller projects. plus I think the whole idea of paying people to contribute, with the projects that money is distributed to being prioritized over other projects, could be wholly against the ideology behind the open source movement.

I think the only way to get people into open source the ‘right’ way would be to have them do it out of their own interest. I have some interest, so I started looking for an easy way to be notified of possible contributions I could make to open source projects. Going out of my way and finding issues to fix for projects can be a little tedious, and I’m mostly limited to projects I’ve heard of. Before long, I came upon CodeTriage. This website keeps a list of open source repositories on github that users can contributes to, and sends you some number of open issues on a recurring basis. The quantity and frequency of issues can be modified, and you can set preferences for coding languages you enjoy. I’ve signed up for twice weekly updates, maximum 50 issues, and set up a few of my favorite languages. I haven’t received an email yet from my freshly set up account, but I think a service like CodeTriage could be exactly what is needed to start fixing the infrastructure issue discussed in Roads and Bridges. This service is integrated with your github account. Now, this may sound a little pushy, but imagine if this was default to github and came turned on? just a few issues a week given to users, with possibly more as someone starts solving issues or as they start creating more repos. Maybe give people badges for reaching issue milestones. People love badges. The people who really don’t want to see a few issues a week can just turn it off, and I imagine a lot of people would, but by having it on by default, a huge amount of people would at least get some exposure to what’s out there for open source, and maybe more people would want to contribute.