What is Open Source?

3 min readAug 10, 2022

The term open source refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible.

Today, however, “open source” designated a broader set of values — what we call “the open source way.”

Open source projects, product, or initiatives helps open exchange, collaborative participation, transparency, and community-oriented development.

Is it overrated?

You know there’s a saying Everything is overrated if you overrate it.

Most people start an open source journey without any prior knowledge and they do for swags and other cool stuff which is fine if you are learning something out of it. Like the HacktoberFest event that happens every year in this event, you have to contribute at least 5 open source projects then you will get swags, many people do it just for the t-shirt. After it, they forget the open source and its real benefits.

And there is one more side of open source i.e some people believe that contributing to big projects is a real open source contribution if you are not contributing to google, amazon, or Microsoft you are just wasting your time and because of this they think that open source is not everybody cup of tea 🍵. It is actually wrong, the open source itself says if your contribution improves something then it’s a real contribution, it doesn’t matter whether you are modifying the HTML page or contributing to complex problems. As long as it helps you to learn something new and excites you to contribute more.

How one should get Started?

Some important Prerequisites that you should do before starting open source

Prerequisites:

After this join communities, there are many open source and awesome communities that will help you to get real-time collaboration and experience. You can learn in these communities and share your thoughts doubts and questions. Communities play an important role in the open source journey.

Here are some of the awesome communities that you can join:

So now you are ready to contribute to open source ✌️

But where should I start contributing as a beginner?

Don’t worry your bro got your back 😎

Best Projects and Programs event to contribute.

Again I am saying “contribution matters not the size”

To start contributing to open source, you can type and search on GitHub “good first issue” it will give you all the issues that as a beginner you can solve and learn from it.

Above mentioned communities also have projects going on where you can contribute your learnings and be a champ!

Some of the open source projects for beginners:

Events and Programs on open source:

Happy Open Source Journey!🥳