A recent thread touched on the question of what counts as contributing to Perl. I feel strongly that contributions to Perl, or any open source project, come in all shapes and sizes. This is a pet topic of mine, to be sure. I wrote an article a few weeks back on the topic, on how to contribute to open source without being a rock star, and I'll be giving a talk at YAPC::NA about it. The article is condensed from some ideas I have for a website that will help people who want to contribute to find ways for them to pitch in.

The obvious contributors to Perl are those who do the work on perl5-porters, adding new features to the core language, and making the regular releases. That's huge. But there is so much more.

So I ask my fellow monks to meditate: What makes a contributor to Perl? Who contributes to Perl, either in the abstract ("People who write CPAN modules") or the specific ("Bob Smith wrote the Foo::Bar module that I used all the time")?

xoxo,
Andy

In reply to What makes a contributor to Perl? by petdance

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