Articles/How can I contribute to FOSS

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Contents

Intro

You may be familiar with Free(dom) and Open Source Softwares and may be using it from some year but you may not be contributing to Free and Open Source World. This happens with most of us because we do not know how to contribute.

Most of the students think that they can contribute using coding. But in this article we are exploring non-technical (non-coding) ways by which a normal user can support/contribute to FOSS.

Put Stickers in You PC

You can download Linux Penguin Logo ( http://lug-iitd.org/images/3/3a/Linux-penguin.png ) Or any other FOSS related logo and paste on your laptop or Desktop. you can use Tux logo on Tshirt also.

Converting JPG images to PNG format

When you download the images from your camera, most probably they will be in jpg format. You can convert to png using this command 

for FILE in *.jpg ; do convert $FILE `basename $FILE .jpg`.png; done

If you know any GUI programming like GTK or Tcl/TK then please make a GUI to convert all jpg images to png. Also I suggest programmer to make a unique daemon which will watch a directory. Whenever user paste any jpg, gif images into that directory, It will automatically gets converted into png format.

Upload images under Creative Common license

There are many photo uploading/sharing website which allow user to share their photos using creative commons licensing. You can use http://www.flickr.com/ OR http://picasaweb.google.com/ .

Write Tutorial and FOSS

If you want to read about Free and open source software then you can visit this site -

Whenever you have time you can edit those books/mannuals Or you can submit new tutorial. You can also translate one article in your native language per week. You can take help from Google Translate Tool for using it. Google Translate will do 80% of translation, rest 20% correction of an article you can do in a week or month.

Stop using IE, MS word, Photoshop

  • Use Firefox or other Free and Open Source browsers.
  • Use OpenOffice or other tools which generate .odt family formats for documents.
  • Use GIMP to work on images

Use only Ogv (Ogg )

It will take a pain but do not watch video using Flash. Use Ogg converter to watch in Ogg format. Read some blogs

In blog has listed websites where you can upload ogg video.

I tricked out Something

If you have done some sort of trick or workaround to some problem then please make a documentation and blog it. This will help a lot to many other user.

Update this document

If you have any other idea by which you can support FOSS then write here.
Refuse to use non-FOSS software in office/college/school. Write detailed bug reports when they face some problem with FOSS software and more importantly be patient when things dont work out, they will owrk eventually, do not jump back to non-FOSS software when something is not working initially in FOSS. -- Vivek Khurana

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