[nylug-talk] OSS Project

[Kevin Mark]

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On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 02:03:42PM -0400, Paul Robbins wrote:
> Does anyone have a good link to an article about beginning an OSS project?
> I work for a fairly large company and most of my day is geared towards
> making someone above me more money.  It is fun, but I really don't get the
> feeling I am contributing anything back to society.  I thought that perhaps
> starting an OSS project would be a good way to give something back.  I am
> really just looking for someone else's description on trying to start a new
> OSS project or something along those lines. Any direction is greatly
> appreciated.  Sorry for the vagueness.
> 
Hi Paul,
as I am familiar with Debian, I can recommend a few things from that
universe.

1. in Debian, you do not have to be a 'Debian developer' to contribute,
instead many software packages are maintained by 'package maintainers'.
The maintainer seeks a 'Debian sponsor' to inspect their code before it
is uploaded into the Debian archive.

2. Reading the Debian developers guide and policy manual. These are
things worth reading as they describe what you should and would do as a
contributor to (one of the biggest) FLOSS projects.

3. fixing bugs
Debian has many project (now as they go from their 'freeze' towards
their release) that are needing folks to look at a bug in code (that
does not have a patch) and find it and send in a patch. These can take
the shape of documentation bugs, translation, cpu/porting bugs , feature
requests, or traditional software bugs. They also have had 'BSP' (bug
squashing parties) around the world for folks to coordinate on doing
these things.

4. Debian has many packages that are co-maintained or group maintained
(usually on the alioth server). So you can join a group of folks. There
are groups that maintain perl, ruby, and other language-specific
packages that do not have individual maintainers.

5. Joining the debian-mentors list for help to create debian packages from
existing source packages.

6. Joining the debian-women list to signup for their 'mentorship'
7. Join the debian 'new maintainer process' to become a Debian developer.

cheers,
Kev
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