As the title say, how can I contribute to OSS without the an IT background ?
I know I can of course donate and I also know some ask for translation but French is usually well translated on most software I use.
Docs or QA. If you find bugs that you’re able to test, it can be helpful to add a comment whether you were able to validate it or not. A lot of times basic information is missing, like screenshots, logs, and versions. This means step one for the maintainer is probing for more info
Thank you for your response!
KDE and Libre Office are the two OSS I use the most and look like an easy starting point. I’ll look into it.
Even if you’re not technical, it should be possible for you to learn how to write a good bug report if you’re interested and as a longtime developer I can tell you from experience that a really good bug report is a real delight to receive.
Do you have any resources for that?
Simon Tatham wrote this several decades ago, but I still think it’s all excellent advice:
Thank you for the resource! I’ll also try bug triage. It looks like a good way to learn what is useful for developpers
Just read it can confirm it’s excellent advice as someone who written quite a few bug reports. Thanks for posting! Might share it at work. Maybe then I won’t be the one who submitts 95% of the teams bug reports😭
And if you’re specifically seeking out bugs, many open source projects provide some form of beta or nightly releases that need special attention before they ship it as an official release.
money
Are you technically skilled using whatever software you are trying to help? many FOSS projects need help with their documentation.
Not that much. Even for bug reporting, I don’t encounter much bugs when using OSS (KDE and Libre Office mostly) and I will not complain about it :)
Documentation is always needed. If you have any aptitude at all for explaining things to people, it’s almost certain that you’d be able to help there.
If you don’t know where to start, I can recommend starting with making a tutorial for doing whatever it was that you yourself last found difficult to learn how to do.
You can also promote them in OSS focused forums many people might not know about those softwares and OSS doesn’t have money to spend on ad campaigns.
You have found a niche maybe. Find a FOSS that needs french translation for it’s documents?
send pull requests using vibe coding :)
ps: don’t.
I tried but no one seems to appreciate my contributions.
You can see all of my ongoing projects here: http://localhost:5000/
FOSS people are so ungrateful!
