Getting Started: How to contribute to open source

ROSE Blog: Rikki's Open Source Exchange
Ruth Suehle wrote an on opensource.com that can help you wade into the world of contributing to open source: Ready to be an open source contributor but don't know where to start? Ruth recommends and explains OpenHatch.
How is it that I've never visited OpenHatch.org before? The site allows you to find a bug you want to work on, ask for a bug to be assigned to you, create a contributors page for your project, find people to work with near you, and much more.
I clicked on “What projects are my neighbors working on?” Find contributors near you in hopes of finding some people in my area. There are a few people listed around here, but I'd love to see more.
UPDATED: I got really excited when I saw the Find a mentor link. I wrote about how hard it can be to find a mentor in our September issue, and OpenHatch looked promising. Unfortunately, I clicked the link and discovered that there are zero people listed as mentors. UPDATE: Thanks to a quick bug fix from the OpenHatch folks, you can now see 43 people who have offered to be mentors.
Have you heard about OpenHatch before, and if so, what do you think about it? And if this is the first time you've heard about the site, do you plan to use it?
Thanks for telling us about OpenHatch, Ruth!
Comments
comments powered by DisqusSubscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
Updated post!
I just fixed the "0 mentors" problem...
When you said there are 0 mentors, I thought, "That can't be right...." Turns out that the front page linked to search for "can_mentor=C", which returns 0 hits. That's invalid syntax for our search engine. Searching for "can_mentor:C" returns 43 people (right now).
So I fixed the problem by correcting the link on the front page.
I'm really glad you gave it a look! The site is an active open source project, with a GSoC student and community contributors. We're always looking for more feedback, and we really encourage people to hang out on #openhatch on irc.freenode.net. We have big dreams about making the community friendlier, and we can always use more people involved on the project. http://openhatch.org/contact/ gives more ways to join the discussion.
We're also working with another group, Teaching Open Source, that's very active. They have a similarly radical mission -- get more students to active within the free software community. They're at http://teachingopensource.org/.
OpenHatc mentors is fixed