Ben Cotton

5063 points
User profile image.
Lafayette, Indiana

Ben Cotton is a meteorologist by training, but weather makes a great hobby. Ben works as the Fedora Program Manager at Red Hat. He is the author of Program Management for Open Source Projects. Find him on Twitter (@FunnelFiasco) or at FunnelFiasco.com.

Open Sourcerer People's Choice Award Moderator's Choice Award 2017 Python SysAdmin Community Manager Creative Commons Developer Fedora Contributor Club Author Comment Gardener Cloud Linux Open science Open Organization Ambassador

Authored Comments

bcotton
Stop searching for projects and start searching for bugs

Great advice. Finding a bug that's personally meaningful is a great way to get hooked on contributing.

bcotton
'Open source' is not 'free software'

"With open source, freedom is a means to an end, that end being a vibrant ecosystem where everyone works together to build great software infrastructure."

Here's the issue with that argument: "open source" as used in this article can be used to prevent a vibrant ecosystem because improvements do not have to be shared. Permissive licenses are popular in part because they allow companies to take the work of others and build closed ecosystems on top of it.