What is Open Source?

Open source is a term used to refer to open-source software. Open source software is software whose source code is publicly available. Anyone can view and change the code. On the other hand, closed source software, also known as proprietary software, is a type of software whose code is only accessible to one person or team that created it. Open-source software is considered more trustworthy because people have access to the code.

Open source software code are available in public repositories on platforms like :

GitHub

GitLab

Bitbucket

Launchpad

These are some of the most used platforms. There are so many other platforms also.

By contributing to open-source, You get professional experience. Your skills get improved. It gives you confidence as a developer because the project is being used by millions of users. It also builds your resume and gives you networking opportunities.

If you are a developer, The first step is to go through the project's documentation and understand the project. If your skills match the project's tech stack, You are good to go. If not, you can learn on the go. There are a lot of good first issues which you can solve. You can fix bugs, introduce new features, enhance code quality, etc.

Contributing to open-source doesn't mean only contributing code. Any kind of contribution is a valid open-source contribution. There are a lot of ways through which you can contribute without writing a single line of code. Some of them are :

Documentation is the most important part of any project. It doesn't matter how good is the code of the project because if people won't understand the project they will move on. A project's documentation gets the most amount of traffic that's why the documentation of the project must be good. If you are good at writing you can contribute by writing documentation for the project.

There are a lot of projects which require translation into other languages. If you can translate the project into your language, You can contribute to open-source.

If anything looks weird to you like something not working properly or something wrong in the UI you can report a bug in the repository.

If you are good at designing you can make UX designs, Wallpaper, icons, etc. This is the design that I made for appwrite when I was a beginner to open source and that's how I started contributing.