At the first edition DevTalks for Juniors, Miklos Vajna will be present to talk about Getting involved with LibreOffice Online and Android. Also, we know about his interest in Open Source, so we asked him why he chose developing Open Source software.  Here is the answer:

There are multiple aspects of this question. You can consider the ethical benefits of free software, or you can focus on the business side of Open Source. My take would be a practical one. The reason I initially dived into Open Source development is because I used some Open Source software that mostly worked the way I wanted, but there was some annoying bug I wanted to get fixed. And instead of waiting for that to happen, I got my hands dirty, and fixed it myself: it was faster and was also fun.

There are other practical aspects as well: if you’re a student, then working on Open Source projects is good content in your CV. If you’re working already, in many cases it’s better to put together solutions from existing building blocks than came up with something from scratch. You can still improve the used components if necessary, and contribute back your improvements.

One last thought: the number of great minds is finite in the world. Life is short. That means we, software developers, should share our problem solutions, so that programmers can focus on solving new, interesting problems, instead of re-solving existing problems, just because someone decided to not share source code. This is why I recommend diving into Open Source software development!