Python for Decision Makers and Business Leaders Transcripts
Chapter: What is Python?
Lecture: Getting support in open source
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Okay, so you've adopted one of these open source projects, and it turns out you need some help. What are your options?
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I guess it depends on what's going on. Did you find a bug? Are you trying to get a new feature or do you just need somebody to work on the project?
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Let's just grab Flask as an example. We're going to talk about this web framework later. Let's imagine you're building a web application with Flask
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and you need to get some support in this broad sense. I need a new feature, a bug fix or I need somebody to work with me.
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There's a couple of things that you can do directly working with the project maintainers. So David Lord, you can see David is the guy here
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who did the last commit. So we could go over to the issues tab you can see there are 20 open issues right now and I could enter a message and say hey
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it looks like there's a problem with this code. If there's legitimately a bug usually, you can come here, the project maintainer
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will address that and fix it. If you have a new feature, you could file a bug and ask for the feature but remember
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you're asking for a favor, there's no reason that they need to take this and do this for you right? So they may, if it's a good idea
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but they may not, if it's not in line with the project. Another thing your can do is one of your developers or you yourself could fork this repo
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make a change and create what's called a pull request, which is, here's a change I've made to this software. Here, I'm trying
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to give it back to you, let's have a discussion. If you accept it, good. I will automatically bring it back.
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So that is also an option. You could reach out to David Lord and offer to hire him as a consultant. I have no idea if he does that type of thing.
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You'll see down here, you can merger this pull request from gray li. That is a fix that somebody else contributed back and David accepted
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to this project, but for popular, open source projects like Flask, you don't have to hire the maintainer. There are literally thousands
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of people out there you can find at places like Toptal, Triplebyte, Hired, what not. These various consultant market places
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and they can pair you up with Flask developers really easily. So, because this project has 47,000 stars, that means it's very popular.
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You can also see that it's used by 350,000 other projects. You can bet there a bunch of people with Flask skills, if it's just a I need
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this thing built. I need a consultant. This works great for certain popular projects some of the time, but what if doesn't?
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What if you need a broader solution? You can check out Tidelift. Now, Tidelift sponsors my podcast, but this is
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not a sponsored placement. This is just me really liking what they're doing for open source And just want to give a quick shout out
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as an option. So, Tidelift has this enterprise subscription. So, it's managed, open source for your app developments teams.
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You get things like security updates indemnification, maintenance. So, what they do is they actually work with people like David Lord from Flask.
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They work with the maintainers of those open source projects, and they group up all the enterprise users of those projects, and they
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all at once, one unified front, work with those projects to help get them maintained, security fixes done and so on.
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So, definitely consider this. It helps support open source, and Tidelift is doing a lot of good stuff for open source, so working through them
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is not a bad idea.