PUBLIC MARKS from jpcaruana with tags "open source" & blog

Tobias Schlitt posted an interesting list of rules on how to get started in an open source project. This got me immediately thinking about an interesting trend I've observed since I dipped my finger in the open source well. Often, helpful tips on what to do when joining a project are provided by experienced open source developers for the newbies, in the effort to make things easier for all. However, even more important, in my view, is how an existing open source project reacts to an influx of new users. Do we chide them for lack of knowledge? Set up a mesh of obscure unspoken rules? How about yelling RTFM triumphantly? Marking a bug as bogus with a sarcastic joke? I am personally guilty of all of the above in my time. What surprises me in retrospect is that I didn't really recognize the point where I crossed the line from simply contributing to an open source project to when I started running it. The fact is, when you don't have the karma (to borrow Toby's definition), nobody cares if you make a little joke here or there. Once you are a representative of a project, what you say and do matters, and things can get blown all out of proportion. So, here are a few rules for people "with the karma" that I've learned. You might be thinking "I don't run an open source project" but in many cases, you become a representative (and therefore one of the people who run it) of the project the instant you achieve enough karma to commit code to CVS, so this post applies to just about all of us!

Gallina: just a GMail based blog :-) (Proof of concept)