Linux Foundation Showcases Salt Project
Here at the Salt Project, we enjoyed reading this recent report from our friends at the Linux Foundation: Open Source Maintainers.
We’d like to invite you to go and read the full report for yourself. Also, we want to give a big shout out to Salt Project Core team members Gareth Greenaway, Pedro Algarvio, Megan Wilhite, Anil Sharma and Salt creator, Tom Hatch for their contribution to this report. Here are a few of our favorite highlights:
Open Source Powers the World
Open source software is the backbone of our world infrastructure. From financial services and healthcare, to telecommunications and the internet—it is no secret that open source runs the world…
The Value of a Positive Maintainer/Contributor Relationship
Maintainers that build successful projects often go to extensive lengths to help first-time contributors improve their contribution and learn how to prepare a code submission, such as checking the format and syntax of code using automated check systems. Gareth Greenaway, currently a maintainer of the Salt project, had submitted an error-riddled PR that the lead project creator, Thomas Hatch, read. The original creator gave Greenaway positive feedback and worked with him to fix the code. Greenaway went on to submit numerous other PRs and later became a Salt maintainer.
Docs Are Crucial to Open Source Success
Not surprisingly, maintainers expressed concern that their project needed to improve documentation. Best practices suggested by maintainers included making sure that project leads demonstrate docu- mentation is a first-class citizen in a project with comparable recognition to code contributions; hiring a documentation coordinator; requiring documen- tation to be submitted with each code contribution; and creating formal events or processes around documentation to make it easier to contribute.