What Mentality Should Be Used to Treat Open Source?
Categories: Thought
A Q&A record on Zhihu, What mentality should be used to treat open source?
There are two questions in the topic. First is what mentality should be maintained when using other people’s open source projects? Second is what mentality should be maintained when open sourcing a product yourself?
What mentality should be maintained when using other people’s open source projects?
1: Curiosity and Learning Mentality
This mentality is mainly treating libraries that are not needed by project to solve difficult problems at hand, but things discovered accidentally. Often can see surprising things when browsing Github trending.
Encountering this kind, generally Clone to local to play following Readme guidance. If like it, will go to Star (can be understood as appreciation for author’s work). At the same time look at code, think if make such a thing myself, how would I do it. It is also very good to submit a PR conveniently, or whether this idea can be used in my future business work.
2: Cooperation and Gratitude Mentality
This mentality is more treating things related to own projects, such as Weex, Webpack etc. If it develops well, development experience for oneself will be much better. When using should be clear about one point: The relationship between users and maintainers of open source projects is not Party A and Party B. At the same time maintainers are not customer service. When encountering problems, or unhappy, should hold the mentality of “collaborating together to solve this problem” more. Any suggestions or places unhappy with use, or feel it is better to do this way, describe clearly and communicate to solve through issue or email, give maintainers more input, so as to better promote its development.
What mentality should be maintained when open sourcing a product yourself?
Here intend to share some things and mentality of Weex Ui open source.
1: Open sourced things are useful to developers
Many times open source is not open sourcing for the sake of open source, more is that this thing is really useful to developers, can improve development efficiency, more implementation input, summary of best practices. For users, can write better code, get off work earlier. Thinking of being on Github trending in the week of open source without extensive promotion, quietly very excited.
2: Sincere Like Mentality
Own sincere like and enthusiasm, treating it as own work to do will be much better than task arrangement.
Later open source development is mainly co-constructing weex-toolkit to make it support Weex Ui better, completion of missing components + enhancement of existing components, continue to expand boundaries, introduce more rich interactive experience + accessibility optimization of components, easy usage + detailed Chinese and English documents etc. work.
3: Open Sharing Mentality
Many times only after things are used by everyone, someone complains and suggests, attracting more interested students to refer in together, more good ideas input, can better promote its development. Currently attracted students from Netease, Tencent, Qianhe Network Technology, Borui Cube Network and other companies to refer in together. Hope to become everyone’s Weex Ui library, not Alibaba’s.
For an open source work, there are many things can be done, including component bugfix, function enhancement and new addition, document correction, translation and organization, and any suggestion, idea exchange, including maintenance of community, group questions, issue answers etc. things can all be done. Happily using while promoting its development is the best.
Please feel free to use and contribute to the development.
Only the combination of Great Vision and Bad Code creates Great Communities !
Above, is some of my understanding of open source. Maybe didn’t say too clearly. Welcome to discuss together.