不要因为没有为开源事业做贡献而感到内疚

　　什么情况下我会参与

　　下面要说的是我参与过的开源项目，以及原因：

• IPython项目，是因为我想给它增加一个它本来没有的特性！然后它就有了那个特性！我把一个性能要求合进了IPython，结果非常酷。

• 这个pandas cookbook项目，是因为我想了解pandas的时候发现没有那么多我所需要的实用资料！还有一个原因！就是我写了一个东西，别人就可以更加了解pandas了！太完美了。

• gzip in julia项目,用来学习gzip是如何工作的。现在我学会了！棒极了。参与开源项目是件超级有意思的事！耶！

　　不要感到内疚

　　你能做的事情有很多。如果你在三个星期里花了超过三十个小时来修复一个网卡故障，那可能是很值的，因为你会学到很多，而且你的硬件会更好地运作！或者也许你会更愿意把这些时间花在陪伴家人朋友或者志愿活动或者踢足球或者看电影或者赚房租上面。

　　有时我听到有人会说“你必须开发开源软件！”，说得好像这是“普遍的善”一样。不要感到内疚。对你没有意义就不要做！除非你知道能获得什么并且觉得值得你花时间才去做！否则的话就做点别的吧！

　　 Lukas Eder 是开源项目 jOOQ 的全职开发者，下面是他对 Julia Evans 文章的评论：

I’m a full-time Open Source developer (for jOOQ), and I get a lot of requests from people who would like to contribute. They’re often asking where they can start, how they should proceed, etc.

Then, I never hear from them again :-)

I think that your categorisation makes a lot of sense. The lack of relatedness is something that many people underestimate in search of The Cool. In our case, working on jOOQ means loving SQL and programming languages to the max. This can get quite boring and frustrating if there isn’t a concrete problem with a concrete database at hand.

In the end of the day, merely contributing to Open Source is much like being a customer of any other (even non-software) product. People also contribute to – say – Microsoft, to help them improve their operating system, or MS Office. It just feels great to be heard, as a customer. But since Microsoft sells commercial software, people don’t make the mistake of trying to contribute withoutrelatedness. So maybe, we should start seeing Open Source more like commercial software in general.