Forget Halloween, October is all about Hacktoberfest! The annual event is a great reminder of all the reasons to get involved with open source development, shining light on the growing community of students, developers and businesses making exciting contributions.
Opensource software (OSS) is software where the source code is available publicly, for anyone to view, modify, and enhance. These projects welcome collaboration and encourage anyone who wants to get involved to modify, develop and use the software for any purpose.
People who give time to opensource projects are called contributors and people who create or manage these projects are called maintainers. The projects themselves are typically hosted on GitHub, where everyone from beginners to expert developers can get involved.
Many of the largest tech businesses have well-established open source communities – Google, Facebook, Intel and Microsoft are amongst the biggest names. The benefits of getting involved are now so widely recognised that, over the last few years, a growing number of smaller companies have started producing more open source applications.
Here are just a few reasons why getting involved with open sourcing is worthwhile for both developers and businesses:
There are lots of ways to get started with an open source project but the most common way for developers to get involved is via events such as Hacktoberfest, Code Clubs and Hackathons. Some helpful starter resources are linked below:
There are several UKFast projects available on GitHub that developers are free to contribute to. We provide instructions in the contributing.md file of each code repository to help anyone understand how to get started as a contributor.
Keep an eye out for a tech blog post coming soon, demonstrating open sourcing in practice. If you have any questions about open-source projects at UKFast, drop us a message at: open-source@ukfast.co.uk
Interested in a tech role at UKFast? Visit our careers page to find out more.