Me and F/OSS
February 02, 2014I thought it would be a fun experiment to list the tools I work with on (at least) a daily basis at work:
- Selenium WebDriver
- RSpec
- Cucumber
- Ruby
- Linux
- Vagrant
- Git
- Subversion
These tools all have one very important thing in common: they are F/OSS. I've recently been doing some soul-searching about what that really means to me.
As a software tester, I don't have a whole lot of ways of giving back to OSS projects, and it's been gnawing at me.
I'm a decent programmer, yet I don't like working to finish software. I like entertaining myself with problems, but I don't think about 'products'. Selophane is a good example; it's an itch-scratch project that made building page objects with specific-to-tag functionality that Selenium was lacking.
I released Selophane's core under Apache 2.0, but I haven't really been a good steward of the code. I don't know how to build a community around it; I'm not even sure I'd have the time to manage it. I've gotten some interest around it in private correspondence, but I've not received one pull request, and only one feature request.
I've been working with a team on a test library that we'd love to open source, but we're not sure if we're even allowed to do it. Probably not, since it's developed on company time. Shame really.