14 August, 2014

How else to help out

Yesterday I blogged about how to help testing. Today, let me share how you can facilitate development in other ways. First of all - you can enable testers!

Help testers

As I mentioned, openSUSE moved to a rolling release of Factory to facilitate testing. KDE software has development snapshots for a few distributions. ownCloud is actually looking for some help with packaging - if you're interested, ping dragotin or danimo on the owncloud-client-dev IRC channel on freenode (web interface for IRC here). Thanks to everybody helping developers with this!

KDE developers hacking in the mountains of Switzerland

Coding

Of course, there is code. Almost all projects I know have developer documentation. ownCloud has the developer manual and the KDE community is writing nothing less than a book about writing software for KDE!

Of course - if you want to get into coding ownCloud, you can join us at the ownCloud Contributor Conference in in two weeks in Berlin and KDE has Akademy coming just two weeks later!

And more

Not everybody has the skills to integrate zsync in ownCloud to make it only upload changes to files or to juggle complicated API's in search for better performance in Plasma but there is plenty more you can do. Here is a KDE call for promo help as well as KDE's generic get involved page. ownCloud also features a list of what you can do to help and so does openSUSE.

Or donate...

If you don't have the time to help, there is still something: donate to support development. KDE has a page asking for donations and spends the donations mostly on organizing developer events. For example, right now, planet KDE is full of posts about Randa. Your donation makes a difference!

You can support ownCloud feature development on bountysource, where you can even put money on a specific feature you want. This provides no guarantees - a feature can easily cost tens to hundreds of hours to implement, so multiple people will have to support a feature. But your support can help a developer spend time on this feature instead of working for a client and still be able to put food on the table at home.

So, there are plenty of ways in which you can help to get the features and improvements you want. Open Source software might be available for free, but its development still costs resources - and without your help, it won't happen.

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