Open Source is all about openness, freedom, and community and somewhat all the above. Is it ?
From standpoint of a fresher, and being thrown at opensource is probably the best thing that happened to my life. Being a bengali and inheriting some cultural communism traits from my homeland Bengal, i really felt this overwhelmingly fun. Here by this post i make an attempt to share my views in context to what i have learnt from this industry valuable to my life.
DIY (Do it yourself)
We often come in situations where a responsibility of fixing a thing is not a individuals choice but is critical in a line of things. The important perception in this scenario is that i and you create we and all such we's create the community. If somebody takes even a small step to fix a thing, that gets magnified by the community as a stable next release.
Design Principles
Open Source design principles involve a lot of variables because of distribution of development workforce. The Bazaar Model discusses all such problems. In these challenges, simple analogies of modularity, control makes it possible for the others to contribute. All these actually are pieces of human aspects put to use to deal with any kind of creative work from somebody being as learned and experienced as a Chief Technology Office to a Junior Programmer. Being modular makes life more simple.
Hacktivism
This is a term coined for somebody who is not satisfied the usual and want to know more of the details by opening a black box. Though this term might seem very awesomely violent to some people and a act of copyright infringement for corporate. it is not so. It is derivative of common man inquisition and quest for learning and a little of "Lets Make Things Work" in a way it is not destructive at all. As long as there is hacktivism in the industry, there is whole new application idea coming to surface every now and then. Looking into a system internal gives more control over usual in a good way.
A Different Taste Everyday
Opensource gives more than it takes. With tons of opensource tools available on the horizon, we have a very widespread choice in the horizon. This is one of the real fun trying out new software to mold some of the very essential lifestyle choices. Starting from reading up mail to set up a cloud storage for your essential files, you can customize and program you way for a new and different way of doing stuff.
New ways of doing or new look and feel the same thing is always rejuvenating.
A New detective Story Everyday
Somebody related to software has a certain levels of pessimism in their lives, maybe because of the fact that no software is well enough to be perfect at its run-time To learn new ways the system can go wrong is just a another bug in our lives. Here simple lessons of perseverance, optimism scrutiny, and zest in improving the system drives this creativity towards more subtle limits. The most important thing is that a simple post-mortem uncovers so many truths about the system, that can be potentially be source of other bug(s). Here a good detective cleans the ecosystem rather than cleaning the system of only the brats under investigation. The detective is somewhat like Max Payne :).
Own what you do.
This one of the awesome wisdom community gives. What is yours is everybody's and what is everybody's is yours. You can get a software and can change components and make it like you own it. This is better than it reads. Any effort that is well enough as an enhancement in this customized system is well enough for the community as it traces back to it. The change might be expected / critical / or might be simple addon serving various other test cases. Either way it adds to the development cycle. VLC is one of the big successes mainly due to this.
Meet the Inspirers.
Opensource is filled with people loving, gentle and knowledge loving people. The kind of people fond of wildlife, photography, music and craftsmanship. Its a delight to know people with such personalities. Just as a matter of fact, I had been to FOSS.IN 2012 conference in Bangalore. I met with sebastian kugler (KDE Maintainer) (www.vizzzion.org)(
http://www.behindkde.org/sebastian-k%C3%BCgler), Tobias Mueller (Gnome 3.6 Developer), Kushal Das (Fedora Developer), Lennart Poettering (systemd Maintainer), Gene Kogan, Kartik Mistry (Debian Maintainer), Ulrich Drepper (Former Fedora Contributer, currently works in GS). Each One of them had contributed to improve technology for themselves and others. It is pure magic that instills so much enthusiasm and inspiration.
Nobody is perfect
The Opensource evolved from mistakes of others. Though shortcomings of a software cannot be attributed to its developer, we get very important lessons of life. PATIENCE AND OPTIMISM. When u identify a bug and deploy a fix, you are actually bridging the gap of some other developer. And somebody might as well do it for you. We also infer from this fact, that the ready to use software is also buggy and we need to monitor and even deploy a fix if necessary. Living in this constant responsible and aware environment is a very important habit to get to.
Nothing is waste.
Somebody's leisure is anothers solution. GitHub, Launchpad, Sourceforge, Bitbucket are full of such small scale yet very useful softwares. A student makes some plugin for a software for disseration grades, ends up getting used by big time corporates, or better ends up being a complete full fledged software. Just as a peice of cloth ends up getting used up, so it software.
Proactive Participation
In opensource "Support" is a thing which is very rare. Proactive Participation in debugging, providing IRC help, Providing Documentations, Cheatsheets, Manuals are also important in software, which gives value addition. I feel very proud to see that majority of reasonably highly used softwares have nice documentation to help people use. Ops Software in particular usually have a very frequent discussions in IRC confrooms and forums, where developers learn about users facing problems and provide help to configuration and use using their expertise. Platforms like stackexchange help in tagging and categorising such expertise.
With all these points i hope adopting opensource instill good values in your life too.
