Ever felt like the software you are using or a website you recently visited could have been better if you were given the chance to do so?
Well, open source projects are yours to take up. Over the years open source community has seen an exponential growth in the number of active participants. To give an idea about the numbers: There were around 1.0 Billion public commits made just on GitHub (https://octoverse.github.com/) last year. Open source development is highly collaborative and involves decentralised decision making ensuring participants to be highly active and resourceful in order to be visible to the others in the community which ultimately leads us to a better place.
Public discussions over the IRC Channels and issue trackers play a huge role in open source development. The continuous feedback, reports, suggestions and support by fellow developers and clients improves overall productivity of all the parties and moreover the decentralised decisions resulting from this contribute to a better code.
If you are a developer accustomed to traditional proprietary software developer, open source development might seem to be a bit of challenge because things are different here. The very fundamental rule about open source is communication and transparency which would be very different from your perception of software development. It will take some time to get the hang of it but the more you stay in it the more you will appreciate it. So, go ahead and give it a try.
Many organizations have understood the need for open source development and have come together to promote it. MNCs and Organizations like Google, Facebook, Samsung, CERN, Microsoft have active open source participation. To take it a step further, in 2005 Google launch GSoC (Google Summer of Code) encouraging students to participate and contribute to open source software development. Since then GSoC has seen a participation of around 13000 students, 12000 mentors and roughly 700 organizations. It encourages students to take up a 3 months project in an open source organization during the summers in return earning a stipend while working in areas related to their interests.
There has been a huge buzz about GSoC over the past few months. Everyone is busy looking into organizations and drafting their proposals as the deadline is approaching. Fingers crossed.
I am sure, every open source developer is aware of GSoC, if not please refer: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com because I won’t be talking about it anymore than I already have. In this post I want to touch upon various such programs (like GSoC) offered by organizations to promote this revolutionary collaboration from individuals across the globe. Below are the list of some open source mentorship programs:
As an intern, you work closely with FSF staff members in your area of interest, such as campaign and community organizing, free software licensing, systems and network administration, GNU project support, or web development.
Pre-university students ages 13 to 17 are invited to take part in Google Code-in, our global, online contest introducing teenagers to the world of open source. With a wide variety of bite-sized tasks, it’s easy for beginners to jump in and get started no matter what skills they have. Mentors from our participating organizations lend a helping hand as participants learn what it’s like to work on an open source project.
The Winter of Security (MWOS) is a program organized by Mozilla’s Security teams to involve students with Security projects.
Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.
Selected teams receive a three-month scholarship to work on Open Source projects of their choice.
Season of KDE is a community outreach program, much like Google Summer of Code that has been hosted by the KDE community.
So we decided to launch our first Tor Summer of Privacy! A program to grow and guarantee support for students who want to collaborate with privacy tools.
The basic terms and conditions of this program are quite similar to Google’s GSoC. The key differences are that:
an EVoC mentorship can be initiated at any time during the calendar year, the Board can fund as many of these mentorships as it sees fit. There are many such programs and competitions you can look at. To know more about these programs please go through a few other links:
https://github.com/tapasweni-pathak/SOC-Programs/blob/master/README.md
https://github.com/tapasweni-pathak/SOC-Programs
https://itsfoss.com/best-open-source-internships/
My resources: https://github.com/github/mentorships/edit/master/README.md