Forge Your Future with Open Source

Preface

Here we are—forty years on from the launch of the Free Software movement and twenty years since the “open source” and its related movement were created—and it’s still really hard to contribute to most free and open source software projects. There are all of these unspoken rules, unfamiliar language, and a lack of documentation that would be impressive were it not so unfortunate. The web is full of articles about how to contribute, but none of them cover everything you need to make your first contribution. You end up playing contribution Whac-a-Mole,^[1] with a new problem or unspoken rule popping up the moment you think you know what’s going on. It’s all so frustrating sometimes.

Don’t Panic, I’m here to help. Welcome, my friends, to ...