Contributing to Open Source

Friday, June 1, 2007 in candy4appfuse, maven
Tags: opensource

A while back, I’ve read this post on the Flock blog (yes, I’ve been using Flock for a while). In this post Matthew Willis speaks about his experience submitting a patch for Mozilla. He gives some advice about getting your patch accepted and also does some analysis of why people stop sending patches at all.

I must admit that the situation depicted is a little disappointing:

So the moral of this story for me is that if you’re working on a Mozilla-based product, hire an existing Mozilla contributor when possible, and engage the community in dialogue often.

Well, I’m not a Mozilla contributor, but I’m enjoying the chance to send patches to maven2 and friends. So far, it’s been just a pleasure. My first patch to maven2 (probably more will follow as I continue to work in Candy for AppFuse) was reviewed and applied in a really short time, and the request to get it into a new build of m2eclipse is progressing at a good pace.

I must also make a note here for the AppFuse guys, which are very responsive on the mailing list and very fast at reviewing (and fixing) JIRA issues.

All in all, the experience of building an open source project is being very rewarding.

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