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Phil's Blogservations
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Posted by philgomes 6:38 PM
"Giving Back"I often have a strong negative reaction when a business leader talks about "giving back" to a community. This tacitly assumes that achieving business success means that something must be "taken away" from that community. Further, it downplays the value that a successful business offers in terms of jobs, government revenue, increased prosperity, and so on. This attitude, in turn, plants the seeds for confiscatory, redistributionist tax policies, unnecessary regulation, and so on.
Consider this, though: I consistently avail myself of the donated efforts of open-source programmers around the world. At home, I run Kubuntu
7.108.04, compiz-fusion, OpenOffice, GIMP, and a host of other applications developed in the free-as-in-speech-and-beer universe.And I, for one, am not a programmer. Further, my perso-professional priorities pretty much preclude me from taking a lot of time to learn. (Time spent learning, say, C++, could instead be put to learning Portuguese, which I so desperately need as I write this from my wife's grandparents' house in Rio.)
So, how does a non-programmer contribute back to open source? Here are some ideas.
So, I guess I should look for an open-source project to contribute documentation to. Watch this space for more.
- Marketing/evangelism: This is, quite simply, not an option for me at this point in my life. Not a matter for discussion or debate.
- Testing: I'm torn on this topic. On one level, it's not only quite exciting to be testing fresh software, but proper testing is an exceedingly important part of a project's success. However, a lot of the time, I'm working on stuff that simply won't tolerate a memory allocation error or buffer overflow as just-one-of-those-things.
- Documentation: This is a part of the volunteer effort that I think makes the most sense for me. I'm a decent writer, I think, and open-source efforts can always use better documentation.
Oh... And here's some background as to why I use Linux.
And a video:
Technorati Tags: linux, foss, opensource
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ABOUT THIS BLOG
This is the blog of Phil Gomes, VP with Edelman Digital and senior advisor to the Society for New Communications Research. This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. Phil currently resides in Chicago, IL.
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