Freedom is about contributions

The most annoying thing about Fedora is that it breaks from time to time. Failures vary in their scope. Sometimes they're really subtle (false security alerts) and sometimes I really want to check if my laptop is as shock resistant as manufacturer claims.

That's the cost of being at the bleeding edge. People experiment, do constant changes, improvements, and introduce new bugs. One may even say that the number of newly fixed bugs could be used to measure  software vitality ;-).

On the other hand, some things that I really, really love make up for everything:

• Freedom - usually it means that you can do what you want with your software. For example, compile KDE with transparency support:

  

  Can you see the orange button through the KCalc?

  Many folks tends to forget about the most important aspect of freedom - which is fixing bugs that annoy you, for yours and others convenience! Remember, complaining is a really bad habit. Don't complain. Report it, fix it or live with it! That's why there is so many Linux distributions. Each one fixes something :-)

• People. If you are ready to invest into a community, the community will invest back into you! This is very strongly related to the previous bullet!

 But what if you can't code? There's plenty of things you can do:

• document problems you have solved. 
• report bugs (seriously, bug which has not been reported is a bug that does not exist).

It's not that you have to. But hey, don't complain!

I got inspired to write this post and remember those obvious obviousnesses by the creator of my beloved game, which he wrote during his studies, and gave up development due to his PhD and company he runs. But recently - community funded a new game release! That's the power of community (even if it is not open source one)!