

What open source projects are you contributing to? - Tichy

These days it is probably a given thing that hackers should contribute to open source projects to hone their skills. Except for the odd bug report, I still haven't found the time, as currently I don't even manage my own projects very well.<p>I would be curious though, what projects are you contributing to, and how did you get started? Are people more likely to start their own projects, or join existing ones?<p>For what it is worth, I consider open sourcing my unpublished mobile games, most notably a "who wants to be a millionaire" style quiz game. Perhaps if somebody else would be interested, I could work up the motivation to do so...
======
davidw
There's a list here:

<http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/>

With the most important one right now being Hecl. Rivet was moderately
successful in the past, and got me into Apache. I've done lots of minor
patches for things, including the linux kernel (lameasses never accepted nor
rejected it...), Erlang, Tcl, OFBiz, etc...

I would probably spend all my time hacking on open source software if money
wasn't a concern... it's a lot of fun.

~~~
kryptos
I did GSoc for Freenet and hopefully will find more time to contribute to
it.If money werent an issue,i would be working full time on the kernel and
Freenet, but unfortunately it is :P

------
wheels
I wrote TagLib, JuK, a couple other small KDE applications, and a handful of
the library classes (inline spell checking, search widgets, maintained the
listview classes for a few years) and more recently implemented a number of
algorithms and classes for ChucK (music orientated programming language).

I'd recommend working at least tangentially in one of the larger projects
since I feel like hooking into those cultures is a really instructive and
challenging environment. Don't underestimate the social component of OSS
projects.

In a big project the easiest way to get started is to pick something you
already use, start running the unstable version (from CVS, SVN, whatever) and
sign up for some mailing lists. You'll hit bugs, and if you've been on the
lists for a bit you'll get a feel for how they're handled in that project. IRC
can also be useful. Often you can find someone there that will kind of
informally mentor you in the project if they like what you're working on.

One big caveat that I always point out: Don't worry about your skills. You'll
learn them if you're motivated, latch on to a good community and have
moderately thick skin.

------
mojombo
I work on a ton of stuff: god, chronic, fuzed, grit, erlectricity, yaws (those
first four are mine or co-mine). You can see them all (and clone the git repos
or look at a feed of my commits) at <http://github.com/mojombo/>

------
greaterscope
Mostly my PHP projects lately: my take on ORM (ORMer); a database abstraction
layer (dbFacile); and some others. They're all geared at making things easier
on the developer.

Also started a console multiplexer app called Knox a few years ago that's been
sitting dormant.

They're all at: <http://greaterscope.net/projects>

In addition to those I submitted a patch to Xynth a few months ago for Debian
support (<http://xynth.org>)

------
mosburger
Avant Window Navigator, <http://awn-project.org/> (also, wiki here
<http://wiki.awn-project.org>)

It's a dock for Linux with Python-based applets.

------
mpc
Apache Xap and Dojo Toolkit.

In addition I have a few things that I've built that I would love to open up.
I just haven't found the time to spend to get the last 5% done needed around
packaging, clean up etc.

------
zemariamm
I used to contribute to yaita.sourceforg.net. It's a GUI testing tool for
swing app, using AOP. It started as a class project me and a couple of friends
had while we were taking our degrees.

------
abstractwater
Blender and Second Life. I also started some work on GIMP but I haven't
submitted anything for GIMP yet. To get started I just sent an email to the
relative mailing lists.

------
toplakm
Orange data maining software. <http://www.ailab.si/orange/>

------
bosky101
started the returnable project, over at <http://returnable.org>

------
jmtulloss
I tend to contribute to projects that benefit whatever else I'm working on at
the time. If an open source project gets me half way to fulfilling a feature,
I have no problem taking it the rest of the way and contributing back. It's
better than starting from scratch!

------
mironathetin
None!

I have never seen the point why highly qualified developers work for free
instead of turning their skills into real money.

Maybe someone can enlighten me (and others who read this and don't understand
too).

------
iamdave
I've contributed some icons to The Fedora Project in the past, but not nearly
as much code related contributions.

------
ashu
the Cairo graphics library

------
lyime
I really want to see some sort of iPhone open sauce apps (:

------
treeform
panda3d - python c++ graphics library <http://panda3d.org>

------
secgeek
i manage <http://newskicks.com>

------
mcu
Banshee.

------
albertcardona
I started TrakEM2: register/edit/analyze/3D model terabytes of images. For
scientific image processing -mostly neuroscience, mostly electron microscopy
images, but also other fields and imaging techs.

<http://repo.or.cz/w/trakem2.git>

<http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~acardona/trakem2.html>

It's based off ImageJ. And yes it is in Java, with plenty of jython scripting
on top.

