TL;DR
We have many FOSS users/devs here. Do you agree with people who present open source as a way to build a “good” GitHub profile and get job? Asking here because we have users helping others without hoping for any gain (except knowledge). These are the kind of people I want to be called as role models.
Edit 1 : Due to my limited English vocabulary, the title here might not the the most accurate for what I wrote in the post. Please feel free to suggest change to title if you think it needs change.
Hi all!
At technical universities these days, there’s a big push towards open source contributions. Looks like a good thing initially, but the motive behind all this doesn’t sound very ethical to me. The argument is that companies will look at your GitHub profile, and if you have more contributions, you present yourself as a more favorable candidate for the job. This is the only argument presented, and I personally won’t say that this is 100% wrong or 100% right. Its incomplete by my definition.
My worry is that nobody mentions the fact that FOSS lets users reclaim their freedom that they are entitled to. Your software runs the way you want; it does only what you want. If you “partially” like a software, you can modify it to your liking. There’s a broader sense of freedom associated with FOSS (very very important), which nobody touches upon.
With open source software, I believe that contributions should happen with the intent of charity. The way some people donate money, food, clothes etc, you donate your time for the benefit of a software and its user community. (Eg. EnOS itself) Don’t do open source because you’re gonna get some goodies as a part of some event or you’re gonna get a “good” GitHub profile. These extra benefits can be a secondary objective, but the primary objective should be the sense of freedom and charity. Ask students if they will even think about FOSS if GitHub stopped showing contributions on user profile page and there were no way to know how much a user has contributed. The standard answer is “No. If it does not fulfill our needs, we won’t do it of course.” This seems to indicate that their intention of open source contribution is only to record contributions and show them during job interview. I think that a person concerned about FOSS will contribute irrespective of whether his contributions show up on a public profile page or not. (I may be wrong).
Worsening the situation, we have YouTubers who present open source as a way to get high salary package/land a good job. I won’t take their names, but what I should is tell that these YouTubers are very popular people. Many students across the country follow them with eyes closed. Last year, before Hacktoberfest 2020, a certain YouTuber gave an example of contribution by editing the README with an unnecessary addition. People followed him en masse and we had a flood of identical spammy pull requests on many repos that time. (those unaware of this should look it up) A very popular YouTuber has again uploaded such a video where we makes some stupid change in the README and creates a pull request. This video was in context of Google Summer of Code, so I’m sure we’ll have misguided students making mistakes.
We have influencers making videos that misinterpret the essence of FOSS. These people are continuing to do so because they are a slave to the (youtube) algorithm. I wouldn’t have cared whatever these people do, but if their actions mislead people into degrading the open source community, then it is a concern for me. Even more because my batch mates are a part of the act. (and as usual, i’m the odd one out )
We have experienced grown ups here, who certainly know better than those algorithm slaves, and users here helping out each other without any hope of monetary gain. I see such people as the the best role models for us students1 wanting to step into FOSS, and their views on this topic is appreciated What do you think about this situation?
Thanks for reading this long post.
Edit 2: This post is in the Indian context. Cannot say if the situation is same in other countries too.
- Unfortunately, I know that most students will follow YouTubers.