As we all know Open Source software is very popular, especially where the licence allows you to use the software at no charge - I’m thinking of the familiar apps like Drupal, Wordpress, Magento, Joomla/Mambo and the rest.
All these applications rely on a huge community effort to maintain and improve, bug fixing, beta testing and providing 3rd party services like addons, themes, templates and so on.
Considering the popularity of these applications, and the fact they are essentially “free to use”, what do you do by way of giving back to the applications respective communities in thanks for these wonderful apps that you all love?
I used to contribute to some community freeware projects before the open source explosion, but I don’t have the time these days to give back to the OSC.
That being said, I help out here and write lots of articles (some contain code), I guess that counts
OK, I’ll start by saying I “give back” to a particular CMS’s community by being active on the users forums helping out newbies and answering technical questions, as well as beta testing new releases of the software.
I don’t know, a lot of projects appreciate people getting the word out - be that content management systems like ModX or browsers like Firefox. Not all open source projects are like that I appreciate, but some are.
Forums and documentation are appreciated by all though
I’m surprised at the lack of response on this thread.
With so many of you offering/touting/suggesting the popular applications like Drupal, Wordpress, Magento, Joomla/Mambo I would have though more folks would be contributing back.
Or is it simply that you just take and never give back?
I tend to hang around their forums and help out when I can with questions, and also maybe helping with documentation. Spreading the word is also giving back in a way I think.
