The Bikeshed

6:41 AM

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Q: How aware is the general public of open source?

To (most) people in IT, terms like "open source" and "free software" bring up a lot of associations. (For some those association differ wildly between these two terms.) Does the sam go for the general audience of the products which these concepts can apply to? (Software, hardware, industrial mach...

marketing

Is this too broad or badly asked?

Or maybe too opinion based?

I'm trying to get a marketing question out there but I'm obviously no expert, this might be too basic..

ArtOfCode

7:01 AM

@overactor it might be, but your last paragraph saves it. You've asked for specific research, which removes both the broadness and opinionated nature.

Martijn

I agree the last paragraph saves it, but the title doesn't reflect it. Maybe it's a good idea to edit the title to ask what research has been published about open source awareness?

Pandya

7:23 AM

Opensource.SE is not open source itself!

Martijn

I vote not to have that discussion here ;)

Though opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/551/… is related (but doesn't have an accepted answer)

StackExchange is not open source at all though

overactor

8:16 AM

@Pandya That doesn't have to be a big problem though...

@Martijn That's a good suggestion. My rationale was that if we are a site for experts, this should be implied, but I'm probably too much of an optimist.

@ArtOfCode, @Martijn does the question read better now?

Martijn

upvoted :)

overactor

You were right, making that clear at the very start changes how the whole question works on the reader.

We need to attract more Marketing experts on this private beta..

or invite*

Martijn

We primarily need more experts to ask non-synthetic questions IMO. It's tricky to come up with good questions when they're not actually questions you're having

2

for me personally, I might have a question once a month tops, and I suspect it's the same for others.

ArtOfCode

8:38 AM

@overactor indeed it does. 5 more points for you :)

Pandya

9:46 AM

Suggestion to rename tag commercial to commercial-software ?

overactor

10:02 AM

@Martijn good point

@Pandya that does sound better

Martijn

not all commercial uses of open source are necessarily software. Commercial seems broader, for example related to CC-NC licensed non-software works

overactor

Now that you mention it, you're probably right

we want to keep it general

maybe proprietary-code should be renamed proprietary ?

3

Q: What are the best ways to get involved with open source projects?

I would like to know if someone could explain to me how to go about working on an open source project. I know that you can use git and other types of programs to commit code, but is there some sort of process in which to officially begin to add to a project. Also, how do open source projects gua...

project-management community forking open-source

shouldn't that be CW?

Martijn

11:36 AM

opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/577/… seems like a nice kite. What do all'yall think? It seems rather broad and opinion-based, but at the same time it's an interesting problem

overactor

12:39 PM

@Martijn I took a shot at answering, I think it's just on the right side of broad

Meta Data

12:55 PM

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Q: Do we want to shy away from gender-specific terms where possible?

I was reading How to deal with a very productive contributor who wants to steer the project in a different direction? and noticed that all proverbs in it were male. Now I'm not 100% sure if this is a situation that actually occurred and that this person is actually male, but it seemed to me like ...

discussion

Pandya

1:17 PM

on answer I found "This question was already asked on Stackoverflow in 2008 (but closed as off-topic there)." Is this off-topic here also?

btw, I didn't know there is similar question @stackoverflow before.

ArtOfCode

1:55 PM

@Pandya It's on topic here because it's about open-source. Being off-topic on SO doesn't necessarily mean it's off topic here too.

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