[CREATE] LGM11 panel proposal: attracting new devs

[Yuval Levy]

On February 20, 2011 02:37:50 am Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> Could we get straight to
> actually communicating to potential contributors, please?

Let's start identifying them first?

Being a contributor is a mindset.  We are all users, but some of us, for 
whatever reason, decide to give back.  What makes the difference?

When I look at the different computing ecosystems, the first thing that jumps 
to my attention are the licensing terms:
- the GPL / copyleft family of licenses tries to enforce contributions ("if 
you distribute binary changes, you must distribute the source code as well").
- the BSD family of licenses is more relaxed about it ("as long as you don't 
go after me, here is my donation to you / the world")
- the proprietary world tries to prevent contribution ("don't even try to 
share.  it's illegal and we'll sue you").

Which one is more conducive to contributions?

Sure, ignoring the world on the proprietary side of things currently means 
focusing on less than 10% of the potential user base, but at a later stage 
they will be addressed as well.

Questions:

1. what % of your contributors use:
a- Free O/S only?
b- Free + non-free with most time spent on Free?
c- Free + non-free with most time spent on non-free?
d- non-free only?

2. what are the reasons for the above situation?

3. how many of your contributors have
a- increased their share of time spent in Free O/S?
b- increased their share of time spent in non-free O/S?
c- moved to adopt completely a Free O/S only from non-free or mixed?
d- moved to adopt completely non-free from Free or mixed?

4. what are the reasons for the above changes over time?

I suspect that once a user is in an environment that encourages sharing it is 
easier to talk to them about specific contributions;  and that the Free 
ecosystem makes it much easier to contribute.

Anecdotes from the Hugin community

one guy, mid 40, passionate of photography, IT professional, Windows user.  
Comes in new.  Rants about how difficult the Windows experience is.  Is made 
curious by the positive experience reports on Kubuntu.  Get motivated to try 
Kubuntu.  Starts scripting his own workflow in Python and share them.  Starts 
contributing small fixes.  After a couple of months he contributes a full 
Python scripting interface to Hugin.  And his primary work environment is now 
Kubuntu.

and there are a few similar stories to tell.

on the other hand, there is only one story known to me of one guy who has gone 
the other way around - from Linux to OSX.

What are the experiences of other projects?

Yuv
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