Open Source Projects to Contribute to in 2022
With a nearly endless array of open source projects available to contribute to these days, knowing where to start contributing can feel easier said than done. Need some inspiration? Whether you’re new to the world of open source, are gearing up for Open Source Fridays in the new year, or just want to see what other folks are excited about, check out a few of our favorite open source projects to contribute to in 2022.
Rocky Linux
What is it?
Rocky Linux is an effort to build a production-grade open source operating system. It was launched after Red Hat shifted its efforts with CentOS to be an upstream vendor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux rather than a downstream vendor; Rocky stepped in to fill this gap.
Why should you contribute?
Rocky Linux has the support of major companies like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and more. Rocky was one of the fastest-growing open source projects in 2021 and has grown to nearly 7,000 participants. The recent version 8.4 was downloaded more than 70,000 times in the first 3 days after launch.
How to Get Involved
The Rocky Linux community is divided into various projects, special interest groups, and teams; these are all listed on their Wiki. They also have a contributing guide that connects you with ways to get involved (you can even join their Mattermost-powered collaboration platform to connect with other contributors!).
OpenSSF
What is it?
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) is a collection of projects aimed at making secure software development more accessible and ubiquitous. They want to make it easy for developers to learn about security practices and more easily distribute and enforce appropriate security policies via tooling and automation. The goal is to help developers identify and address security issues.
Why Should You Contribute?
Software security has become a hot topic in recent years, with 2021 seeing a massive surge both in attacks and the solutions available to respond to vulnerabilities. OpenSSF has the backing of numerous major companies who are all aligning around the information outlined in President Joe Biden’s executive order to improve supply chain security.
How to Get Involved
The OpenSSF community is divided into working groups based on the repositories listed in the community’s GitHub organization. They also host regular town hall meetings that are open to the public and have a series of free courses to learn more about secure software development.
Jina.ai
What is it?
Jina is an open source search library that’s powered by neural networks and offers the ability to search across all data types, including video, images, long/short text, music, source code, PDFs, and more.
Why Should You Contribute?
Data indexing and search is tough to build, but is becoming more ubiquitous in the modern era. Jina is a unique project that makes it easy to implement data search across all data types to fit a wide range of applications.
How to Get Involved
The Jina community has multiple ways to get involved including writing code, improving documentation, producing guides and blog articles, hosting events, and contributing AI models.
Calendso (Cal.com)
What is it?
Calendso positions itself as the open source alternative to Calendly and was the #1 product of the month on Product Hunt when it launched back in May. It integrates with most major calendar providers to let you automatically schedule meetings with anyone in the world. The back-end APIs and front-end tools are completely open source and self-hostable.
Why Should You Contribute?
Scheduling can take up a substantial amount of time depending on the type of work you do, and tools like Calendso make it considerably easier to take care of this challenge. They’re also an incredibly open company and have a dashboard that provides detailed information about the health of their company and community.
How to Get Involved
All of the collaboration happens over at the Calendso GitHub repository.
Interested in Contributing to Mattermost?
Of course, we always love getting contributions to make Mattermost a better collaboration platform for everyone! If you’re interested in contributing to the platform, participating in Hackathons, or otherwise getting involved in our community, check out all the ways to contribute to Mattermost.
