Someone you’ve never met fixed a bug in something you use. You can read the fix, learn from it, and send one back.
That’s an everyday pleasure of free and open-source software, or FOSS. The code comes with permission to use, study, change and share it, under its license terms. Curiosity can turn into a contribution. Sometimes it starts with “surely that should be a 5.”
1983
Richard Stallman announces GNU: a plan for a free Unix-compatible operating system. An operating system is quite a large thing to put on your to-do list.
1985
I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it.
Richard Stallman, The GNU Manifesto
1989
The first GNU General Public License puts copyleft into a reusable license. When you distribute covered software or modified versions, recipients get rights to the source too. Copyright doing a rather different job.
1991
Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
Linus Torvalds, comp.os.minix, 25 August
That hobby became Linux, a kernel used in servers, phones and plenty of other machines. People kept sending patches. They still do.
1998
Christine Peterson suggests the term “open source” at a meeting in Palo Alto. The Open Source Initiative forms that month. The new label helps make the practical case for sharing code to businesses, alongside the free-software movement’s emphasis on freedom. Overlapping work, different arguments.
2005
The Linux community needs a replacement for BitKeeper, and Git gets built. With a full clone, you have the repository’s history locally: you can commit, branch and compare changes without asking a server. Its first commit has a promisingly modest description:
commit e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290 Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell
2008
GitHub launches, putting Git repositories and collaboration on the web. Sending patches by email was already an established practice. Browser-based reviews gave people another way in: read a change, discuss it, and merge it.
2014
Heartbleed exposes a memory-reading bug in affected versions of OpenSSL, a widely used encryption library. Fixing the code is one job; getting the fix into the many systems using it is another.
2021
Log4Shell, a vulnerability in Log4j, sends teams looking for a Java logging library deep inside their applications. A useful reminder to know your dependencies, including the ones your dependencies brought along.
Ongoing
Volunteers, paid maintainers, foundations and sponsors all help keep projects going. There is no single funding arrangement that fits them all. Free to use doesn’t mean free of work.
This is the MIT License, one common choice. Other licenses ask for different things.
Anyone may use it. Anyone may copy it. Anyone may change it. Anyone may sell it. Keep the notice.
You can even sell it. “Free software” has never simply meant “no price tag.”
A useful commit message explains why the change exists. A small test shows what used to break. A review tells someone what to try next. These are helpful even when the next person is you, six months later.
Choosing a license makes the permissions clear. Crediting contributors makes it easier to find the people behind the work.
function connect() {
- retry(3)
+ retry(5)
}
Connections are flaky on slow networks. Five retries fixed it for me.
You’re the maintainer. Try this fictional review. Your words stay in this page; nothing is sent.
It’s their first contribution. They found the problem on a connection you haven’t tested.
7ab41f2 fix retry behavior on slow networks e0f77b3 add backoff between retries
The retry fix is in. So is a delay between attempts, to give the connection a chance to recover.
Two people, two patches. A slightly better afternoon for whoever uses it next.