Getting Involved With Open Source Projects

[Princess]

I've just discovered Wikibooks and have been taking the time to write the F# Programming (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/F_Sharp_Programming) book (not very well, but its more than what existed a week ago).

I keep finding open source projects that look interesting, but have almost zero activity or downloads --- either that, or I find projects that are extremely active (like DotNetNuke, Paint.Net), and I just can't bring myself to start mangling up other peoples code. I like writing code, but I don't usually tread in areas without first being invited.

Is anyone here involved with any open source projects?

[six7s]

I subscribe to one of the OpenOffice mailing lists and just yesterday received the following, which I haven't fully digested yet... but even skim-read suggests that it might be quite interesting... and maybe even profitable :)

All,

The Community Innovation Program Awards Committee is pleased to announce the winners of this year's contest. We were impressed by the quality of the submissions and by the work demonstrated, and on behalf of the OpenOffice.org Community, look forward to working with the Entrants.

There were four award levels, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Honourable Mention. We heartily congratulate everyone who won! We have only named the team leaders here and regret that we were unable to fully name all the team members at the time of this announcement but in the coming week will strive to publish brief interviews and photos of the winners. We will also try to keep interest going in the work done. Finally, we hope that the successes demonstrated here by the contestants (and there were many) will excite other groups to participate in the next competition. The monetary reward is significant, but we believe that the real beneficiary is the Community: We all benefit from the work done in this program.

We describe the proces used below, and for each category state how much cash, in US dollars, each winner was awarded by Sun Microsystems, out of the USD $175,000 allotted OpenOffice.org. (The Committee adjusted the sums to be given so those in the Gold/Silver/Bronze categories won more money than otherwise stipulated.) A table listing winners is at http://development.openoffice.org/community_innovation_program_winners.html , and you can find this message, with links to the projects worked on, at http://development.openoffice.org/awardees-2008.html .

A full description of the rules can be found at http://development.openoffice.org/community_innovation_program.html .

<snip/>

OOo Community Innovation Program - 2008 Awardees (http://development.openoffice.org/awardees-2008.html)

[pingnak]

You can start your own 'Open Source' program. I have several.

I will now explain why there are thousands of open source projects and not much activity on most.

Most of them suck and/or the people who started them didn't carry on working on them after they got 'a real job' or something else interrupted their work and they couldn't re-kindle their enthusiasm.

I'm in another category.

OK, my projects 'suck', too.

I tend to use 'Open Source' space on SourceForge.net because it's a free SVN server. Backup and versioning for free, and all I have to do is let people see my code. Not a problem. Most of it isn't very interesting to most people, and most people who would be interested would more easily reinvent the wheel based on my examples than learn to use my code, so there's very little activity on the libraries and prototypes.

sourceforge.net/projects/squat
sourceforge.net/projects/hbrc
sourceforge.net/projects/flex2cpp

The only one of the three that gets much use by others is the flex2cpp project. I know of several projects that use my build scripts, and even got a DONATION. Whoo-hoo! $13 right into my PayPal account!

The code I keep there is important enough to me that I want to make sure that even if my house burns down and my other backup gets stolen by space aliens, it'll still be around somewhere. If it's useful to anyone else, then it's all good.

Another important thing that 'open source' provides is that when I do work for hire, obviously I can still re-use 'my code' (the libraries I used). There will be no misunderstanding that some library code of my own that I used will belong to 'them', whoever 'they' are. Believe it or not, some of that 'squat' project mess is in various embedded game devices. The 'hbrc' mess is in two 3D Flash games.