Disclaimer

Not trying to blame anyone here. I‘m just taking an idea I‘ve read and spinning it further:

Intro

A lot of people use free open source software (foss), Linux being one of them. But a lot less actually help make this software. If I ask them why, they always say „I don’t have the coding skills!“.

Maybe its worth pointing out that you don‘t need them. In a lot of cases it’s better to not have any so you can see stuff with a „consumer view“.

In that situation you can file issues on github and similar places. You can write descriptions that non technical people can understand. You can help translate and so on, all depending on your skills.

Other reasons?

I‘d really like to know so the foss community can talk about making it worthwile for non coders to participate.

  • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Using GitHub is a skill of it’s own, and requires knowledge of coding practices. It’s hugely confronting to someone without coding experience

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yes, absolutely but github (which is only an example, mind you) has a lot of consumer friendly accomodations like github gui and cli.

      You can edit stuff directly in someone elses repo (or so it seems) in the web browser. I know you have to do a branch and a pull request but thats something that can be worked on.