The openEuler community has been established for three years. The community thrives with the support of its users and developers.

At openEuler Summit 2022, the community presented the openEuler Star award for outstanding individual contributors and groups.

We are honored to invite Liu Fushou, an openEuler Star, to share his learning and work in the community and introduce how to contribute to the community.

About the Interviewee ​

Liu Fushou, developer of the openEuler community

Hello, guys. I am Liu Fushou, an open source enthusiast. It's been one and a half years since I joined the openEuler community. I majorly participate in discussions in the "Migrate to openEuler" and some other openEuler communication groups.

Interview Details ​

What do you think of openEuler?

As an open source enthusiast, I understand that an operating system is a huge project. Packaging resources of a single piece of software may not be difficult, but when multiple pieces of software need to be packaged, it will be a huge workload and require a lot of developers to complete. openEuler gathers manpower to coordinate the work of these developers, provides them with easy-to-use infrastructure, and improves the quality of distributions by optimizing processes.. The community not only gathers the strength of existing talent, but also incubates new talent to promote the development of open source software. As one of the beneficiaries of open source, I hope that software developers and open source enthusiasts can take this opportunity to contribute to openEuler as well as enhance personal skills.

You won the openEuler Star award, which means you have made outstanding contributions to openEuler. Could you please tell us what your role is in the community?

Before joining the openEuler community, I participated in some other open source communities, such as Deepin, Raspberry Pi, and Wikipedia. I started from a novice, got a lot of help from others, and helped others as well. Both online and offline open source activities have brought me valuable experience, making it easier for me to understand the problems raised by novices and even predict the problems that novices may encounter. I realized that this ability can help improve communication between novices and experts. Therefore, after joining the openEuler community, I found my position of helping users accurately describe or reproduce the problems they encountered. Sometimes, I can solve some basic problems for users, so that developers can focus on more meaningful issues.

To some extent, I might be a walking dictionary in openEuler communication groups, glad to share what I know with others.

How do you think new developers can participate in community contributions?

I think many new developers may have the same feeling as what I felt when I just came into contact with this large-scale open source project. In the beginning, I was not familiar with the gate mechanism and the development, build, test, release, and maintenance phases. Though I wanted to make contributions, I was afraid that I would mess up things. To overcome such feelings, I tried to listen and communicate more. For example, participating in regular meetings of SIGs is a good choice to understand the community operation, and reading markdown files in the SIG repositories helps get familiar with development and test procedures of related products quickly. So don't be afraid. New developers can find what they can do in the community.

Do you have any suggestions for new developers?

My suggestion is to communicate.

Earlier, openEuler did not have a WSL image that I needed. I contacted Mr. Li Baolin. I met him in an offline DevRun activity. Mr. Li told me that he had an intern who was building a WSL image and the image was almost ready for release. Taking this opportunity, I met new friends and avoided repeated development.

In a word, communication and sharing are important for contributing to the community.

You mentioned that the openEuler community incubates new talent. Can you recommend some talent incubation channels of openEuler?

For college students, Open Source Internship and Open Source Promotion Plan are provided. There are also various competitions, such as the openEuler track of the Kunpeng Application Innovation Competition and the computing track of the Huawei ICT Competition. For college teachers, there is an openEuler accelerated talent development plan, and students can benefit from it as well.

I think there are two types of talent: practitioners and enthusiasts. Many operating system vendors participated in the celebration of the third anniversary of openEuler at the end of last year. They have developed their own commercial distributions based on openEuler and are also using their own technologies to feed back openEuler. These practitioners from commercial companies who are closely involved in the affairs of the openEuler community are, in my opinion, talent jointly incubated by the OSVs and openEuler community.

Thanks to the open source ethic of openEuler, I am able to met like-minded friends and enhance my capabilities. I like Linux, and I'm sure many people have the same hobbies as me. The openEuler community welcomes us, so that we can grow with openEuler. I think this is the concept of incubation. The open source community itself is a channel for incubating talent.

What are your concerns in community affairs? And what's your following plan?

I'm more concerned about the friendliness of the community to newcomers. I plan to optimize documents in the community. Accurate and concise documents can improve project management efficiency as well as facilitate program development. If you guys are willing to contribute to the community, don't worry about your technical foundation. After all, open source projects are not only about code; non-code contributions are also necessary.

Expectations ​

Thanks for giving me the openEuler Star award.

I'd like to say to open source enthusiasts that, submitting a PR or an issue is a way of contribution, so do friendly communications.

openEuler has been growing over the past three years. Community developers and contributors are growing with openEuler as well. I believe that openEuler will grow into a world-leading Linux distribution and attract more developers to create excellent open source projects.