Disclaimer
Not trying to blame anyone here. I‘m just taking an idea I‘ve read and spinning it further:
Intro
A lot of people use free open source software (foss), Linux being one of them. But a lot less actually help make this software. If I ask them why, they always say „I don’t have the coding skills!“.
Maybe its worth pointing out that you don‘t need them. In a lot of cases it’s better to not have any so you can see stuff with a „consumer view“.
In that situation you can file issues on github and similar places. You can write descriptions that non technical people can understand. You can help translate and so on, all depending on your skills.
Other reasons?
I‘d really like to know so the foss community can talk about making it worthwile for non coders to participate.
It sounds like we need PM’s to act as a liason between developers and end-users to bridge the difference in jargon and way-of-thinking.
I never thought I’d say having PM’s were going to help. Ironic.
That’s supposed to be part of their job, right? Along with coordinating the dev team’s efforts: who works on which, which aspects of the project is to be prioritized, which bugs are to be fixed ASAP; and other things that doesn’t come to mind at the moment.
But what I am actually imagining when I made that reply is on the other side of the “business-dev” divide. I’m actually thinking of someone who’s leading the QA team? I guess? I don’t even have any idea how it all works out on large corporate software projects.