Slashdot Mirror
Finding Open Source Projects Looking For Help?
aus writes "I've been doing web development for about 10 years now. It's been very good to me, but I want to do more than write HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS. Since the job market isn't all that great right now in the US, it would seem that volunteering some time on an open source project would give me the satisfaction I'm looking for. The problem is finding a project that wants/needs help that I would also be interested in. I've tried browsing around on Sourceforge and Freshmeat ... is there a site somewhere that I'm not aware of that has classifieds where open source project maintainers post 'job' listings?"
Find project you like or use and start contributing. Or ask them if they need any help.
stackoverflow features some user submitted ads for open source projects.
In the volunteer aspect it is more of a passion based decision than an recruitment oriented process. My advice is find something you both care about and also feel the site in question needs improvement. Next, simply hop on the forums or news feed and offer your services. It doesn't necessarily hurt to have some material already developed to get the discussion flowing.
Higher profile is probably going to be a bit more difficult so you may not want to go looking for the top 10 applications of all time. Those circles (even of volunteers) tend to be more work to edge your way into responsibility. Still, my experience has been very positive with contributions and generally working with a project I do not own. I had a good deal of fun one weekend with a BitPim developer banging out support for my phone.
If you need explicit areas where your talents could probably be used I highly recommend seeing if you can get the guys over at http://www.memtest.org/ to let you revamp their page. The program is nice, but the web page is atrocious.
Does anyone else have any suggestions for who needs a make over? (That could be a reality series television show!)
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Please someone help X.org. They need it pretty bad.
All open source projects are hiring - just find a program you like that has a bug or omission. If it's useful for your day job, even better.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
use your mad php/css/html/js skillz to make a website where people can find projects that need help.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
This might be useful
https://openhatch.org/
Nolambar
Find a project with a mailing list where people are asking for a feature that is just below the radar, keeps getting put off because of more important things. Implement it, submit the patch, and pray. If no love, which is unfortunately common and even likely for new contributors, shoot video of the feature in action and send a letter out to the mailing list linking the video, and let them know where they can find the patch if they want it, start collecting and posting feedback on the patch from users.
Some of you FOSS guys chime in here and correct me, but I bet any and every project would welcome you if you offered testing, writing testing scripts, and writing docs and help.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Try OpenHatch, a website that catalogues bugs needing fixin' in loads of opensource projects.
https://launchpad.net/
And most realize it. Find a project that interests you. Start using it. Download the source and play with it. Subscribe to the mailing-lists/forums etc. Once you are comfortable and think you know what is going on start filing bug reports, submitting patches, and participating in discussions. Concentrate initially on the boring stuff nobody likes to do such as sorting through old bugs and cleaning up documentation. Eventually you'll be offered commit provileges.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Is a pretty decent PHP framework but the Docs are practically nonexistent - seems like you could contribute there.
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
http://www.lumiera.org/
With only 2 coders keeping XBMC alive on the Xbox we could ALWAYS use more help. Head on over to http://www.xbmc4xbox.org/forum and start volunteering already.! Go. Don't walk. RUN
you asked:
http://www.fsf.org/resources/jobs/listing
I created pleaseforkme.com with the intention of solving this problem..just haven't had time to get people into using it!
OpenHatch, a website I help run, exists to help people find ways they can contribute to free and open source software.
(It was covered on Slashdot a few weeks ago.)
We have a few things that you might like:
If you want to work on a project which has contributors in your area (maybe you want to get together for a hackathon, or to ask questions about how something in the code works), check out the ubiquitous People Map. You can see everyone on the site or browse by project or skill.
OpenHatch is itself free software, and we have a small and growing volunteer contributor base. (-:
Let us know what you do or don't like!
|/usr/games/fortune
FOSS advertisements currently running:
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/53346/open-source-advertising-sidebar-2h-2010
FOSS advertisements that have run until recently (but probably still can do with some help):
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/31913/open-source-advertising-sidebar-1h-2010-closed
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
Want to try your hand as sysadmin work?
Work-Needing and Prospective Packages
http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
A little browsing on Sourceforge and Savannah should have led you to http://sourceforge.net/people/ and http://savannah.gnu.org/people/
The Sahana Team would love to have some more hands! http://agasti.sahanafoundation.org/
You're a webdev? I know you said you don't want to keep doing that, but what else are you happy doing?
Right now, GNU Octave is looking to rebrand itself and is starting a website to rival Matlab Central. The The Octave-Forge pages also need help, and a hot new designer star just recently came along who is helping us with logo and brand image design. His name is Fotios Kasolis.
You could do a lot of good if you got involved with us. Plus, Octave itself is interesting if you're into mathematics and numerical analysis.
Now, you sound like a perfect candiate for my project, GPSEE -- http://code.google.com/p/gpsee.
We're doing out-of-browser JavaScript (à la CommonJS) and want to move into the web server at some point -- sort of like mod_perl, or maybe mod_php. An experienced PHP coder knows the web-server/CMS/package-system/yadda-yadda-yadda ropes, and you already know the core language -- but you don't have to put up with the DOM... making JavaScript fun again.
We've got lots of rough edges, a dearth of documentation, no release candiates (soon), but a solid core product that is used daily by a handful of folks to do Real Work. The right outside developer(s) could push this project into a being a major hit by scratching the FOSS community's itches, rather than our own.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Given your skill sets, Drupal may be a good match.
They've got a huge amount going on for v7. With something of that size, you can find whatever niche is most interesting to you.
Would you rather find something it ought to do but doesn't yet and build a module?
Are you more interested in design and want to add themes that let people do things they can't already?
Do you want to help something existing? They could use help ensuring v5 and v6 modules are ported to v7?
Are you a good leader? Your local drupal user group could likely use someone to run code sprints to do the above.
Are you detail oriented? Even non coders can get involved with the QA for code sprints and the like.
Are you good at explaining things? Contribute documentation or tutorials.
As you can see, the project's big enough, pretty much anything tech you're interested in, you can get involved with.
And yet, something like http://slashdot.org/submission/1274594/Is-Ubuntu-becoming-unnecessarily-complex goes unnoticed.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Learn some Java and come help TripleA, a wicked Java based strategy game engine. triplea.sf.net
The Gimp palatte editor could use a lot of improvements, I have written up some possible feature here, that page also contains a few other issues that nag me in other software.
Why would there be a "job" listing? There's in general no pay, no benefits. People that don't have any interest in the project as such but just want to tag their CV with it are usually more work than they're worth. Pick whatever open source project which is in a field you're interested in, where there's some itch you'd like to scratch, join the development mailing list and see what you can do. Sometimes there's merely the need to ask, one tool I worked with had a manual "coming soon" so I emailed and asked, spent 2-3 hours compiling one and it's still the one in use today. It's not like it takes interviews and they're afraid of bad "hires", anyone who seems reasonably independent and won't be a drag on everyone else is generally welcomed. Just remember you have a limited amount of handholding and try figuring out stuff on your own before asking about every little thing, you'll do fine.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
OpenHatch was mentioned previously, but I'll mention it again for completeness sake. I'm now getting a "500 Internal Server Error from it." (Slashdot effect). Also, there's a list of projects with mentors on the "Teaching Open Source" wiki. Furthermore, as people noted, most open source projects could use some help and you can approach those that interest you.
Finally, touting my own horn, I'd like to note that I'm willing to mentor people with their first steps in my own open source projects. Hack on!
We have two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we read. http://www.shlomifish.org/
Recently on slashdot there was a story covring a web site which allowed open source contributors (indviduals) to register their location. You could search locally or view a local map of people interested in contributing to FOSS. Each profile could list those projects to which a person had contributed, or is interested in contributing in the future.
Does anybody know the name of that site? I wonder if it might be openhatch.org, which currently seems /.-ed, but I don't see mention of a map in descriptions of that site.
The interface I remember was directed at identifying local people who want to contribute to open source, whether developers or documentation writers.
Two suggestions for you on that front.
|/usr/games/fortune
VolunteerMatch is exactly what you describe
Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you
Seems like these projects are the first to check out. Subscribe to their mailinglist and IRC channels to get a feel for how the projects works and if you feel like it could be fun to be part of said project. This way you will also figure out who the people are to talk to to get your started. Other than that if you have some heros, start following them on twitter. I am sure they will frequently mention interesting OSS projects they are checking out or that they are contributing to. Finally you could consider joining on the development of resolutionfinder.org. Could be a fund project with learning opportunities expanding the Solr driven search, adding data mining tools to expand the content, coming up with ways to integrate expert user feedback into the editorial process, maybe work on SEO aspects etc. All the while doing something that could really make a difference in the world, aka making UN resolutions more accessible to the world. Check out for the source code: http://code.google.com/p/uninformed
you can always work for me for free!!! Doesn't it sound great?
You can't handle the truth.
Looking at your skill set I would recommend e107 CMS at http://www.e107.org/
All of them are not looking for help.
Not all open source software are open source because of the community collaboration aspect of it.
Some people just want to do their thing and work at it alone but for various reasons want to publish the source (ideological reasons, bragging rights, looks good on a resume, etc.)
I don't know how common this is, but it definitely exist.
Another reason a OSS project might not really be "hiring" is that it is half dead. It has a TODO list but it didn't make a release in a couple of years and there is no obvious activity that indicate another release is coming. If you are looking to make a meaningful contribution this is maybe not the project you are looking for.
I did a little volunteer translation work on Ubuntu, and i liked it. I found Ubuntu's system, Launchpad, great for that sort of thing.
Not only translations, but also bug reports and discussion are well formatted in that system. Which makes it easy if you want
to contribute to a project. Look up a project you like, browse through the bugreports and contact the maintainer if you want to
contribute, is my best guess...
http://lauchpad.net/
If you don't like my sig then don't read it.
Burning Man is looking for developers to help with their open source projects. You can't get much cooler than that.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
I recommend checking out the list of participating organizations in Google's Summer of Code program. http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2010 All of the projects are active, legit and looking for new participants.
There's something that I think has been overlooked. I'm sure there are hundreds of projects out there which are single developer zones. I know I have four of those at the moment, two of which are on the back burner. The problem with getting involved in these is that there are generally no mailing lists or forums. If you're lucky they are up on sourceforge/freshmeat or similar, but there'll be no public communication cause the dev is flying solo. In this case you might want to search sourceforge for projects with low numbers of developers but high activity (not sure if you can construct a search like that tbh). You can start by looking at these two ;)
The advantage of joining a project like this is that you can get it on the ground floor with the exciting coding, rather than the maintenance and bug-fixing stuff, assuming that's what you want to do. I think these projects are far more likely to hand out 'commit privileges' quite early, if not immediately.
If you want a project that would make you popular as hell why don't you code an open source Skype client. Skype have released lots of API info recently and the libs are available for download. The reason why I am saying this would be a good project is because right now the propriety client offered by Skype is to put it mildly "lacking in stability and function". At the moment making a Skype video call under any version of Ubuntu released in the last 2 years is rubbish with the video dropping out all over the place.
http://goldchest.sourceforge.net/
If you wanted you own project, you might consider developing useful open source stuff for Android or Maemo (Nokia N900).
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
If anyone is interested in elite type games but on planets then you might be interested in helping out on my project.
I have a list of bit sized bugs here: https://openhatch.org/+projects/Hardwar
www.hardwar.org - A remake of the old classic Hardwar
I've been looking around for some to help with a private cloud computing platform I've been working on for the past 2 years ever since EMC/VMWare/Cisco's announcement late last fall about beginning a collaboration in the field. The project uses an artificial neural network to adapt nodes to specific roles based on server load (routing/ip-tunneling, database, webserver, processing-grid, etc) and has a currently-not-embedded web-based GUI for the interface. You can find the projects below if interested: http://www.novadb.org/ The private cloud computing platform itself - designed on FreeBSD but should be POSIX compliant (with Crypto++ installed for the custom network protocol and some QT-based stuff I'll probably roll my own for eventually to drop the QT dependencies). http://www.inetgui.org/ The web GUI - heavy on HTML/CSS/JavaScript (very heavy on JavaScript) - using PHP/MySQL as a prototyping scaffold.
If you present yourself as a threat to the project's developers, you will never get commit privs, and most likely your suggestion will just end up in the "blue-sky" milestone. Constructive criticism has its place, but it's all in how you present it.
If his ideas are that good you should be taking them eagerly and maybe even prioritizing some of them to work on yourself despite not giving him commit privs! Saying that recognizably good ideas will get kicked to the curb if they are presented in a way that's counter to your group's sensibilities tells me that you probably developed the attitude problem before the newcomer did.
Swallow your pride once in a while, for crisesakes.
"We'll take your ideas and not let you work on them here" is how you deal with immaturity... not simply "We'll ignore your ideas." The latter attitude makes it easy for all kinds of people to write off your project and eventually walk away in disinterest.
SourceForge does have a help wanted page at: http://sourceforge.net/people/
In the end he got it out by using an open sauce jar file
29 mpg. YMMV.
Make video calls work on pidgin/adium.
My tip would be WebGUI. WebGUI has a community that exists for a large part out of companies. And these companies often hire contributors (both full employment and freelance). Also with your html and css experience you could create themes. You can share or even sell them on the Bazaar.
It is based on Perl in stead of PHP. But if you stay with design you will never see a single line of Perl. And if you rather do some coding, Perl should not be that hard to pick up for someone with PHP experience.
---
Google Code Hosting does the same things as SourceForge.net, just without all the excess crap. I have a project on there, PsyMP3, that I wrote in FreeBASIC, a modern, GPL'd BASIC dialect. If you want, give me a hand. I don't obfuscate my email on Slashdot, so you can drop me a line there.
Find a project with a bug tracker and start working on things... For example Mediawiki has quite a few open bug reports that you work on.
Surprisingly I suggest my own project. :-)
Let me explain why I think that supporting a programming
language project (and especially Seed7) is important:
Languages are an instrument to think. Natural and computer languages
provide a way to formulate ideas. How easy an idea can be formulated
depends on the capabilities of a language. When new ideas emerge a
language might need to be extended. Remember that the only constant
thing in life is change. This led to the idea to make extensibility
the most basic concept of a programming language.
When a language is syntactical and semantically extensible all other
features can be added sooner or later by using extensions. Most
languages are extended by using ad hoc extensions for the syntax and
the compiler. In the long run this is a wrong way. Syntactic and
semantic extensions should fit into a structured concept. Otherwise
a language and its compiler are in danger to become unmaintainable.
:-)
Please give me some feedback.
Seed7 has several areas which need improvement. E.g.:
- A database interface. Here I suggest something in the direction of LINQ. It is IMHO important to integrate database statements in Seed7 to avoid SQL-Injection. Sending unchecked strings as database commands from the user level should be avoided (or even prohibited).
- Integrating a widget library (or inventing a new one) without complicated concepts with events and event loops (this should be hidden somehow).
- Interface to OpenGL/Mesa (Complexities and OS/library differences should be hidden in a thin layer).
- Checking and improving the documentation (this is a good first step to get understanding of Seed7 and its concepts).
- Introduce statements with curly braces (many people are opposing Seed7 and don't have a closer look just because it is not a curly brace language).
- Provide a mechanism such that Seed7 functions can be called from other programming languages.
- Of course you can choose whatever you want.
If you want to make a better world and don't fear the language competition Seed7 is the right project for you.
Greetings Thomas Mertes
Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
Not sure what languages you know, you mention PHP and that is enough. There are plenty of PHP projects that some people vitally depend on, like OScommerce. Lots of things to improve there - the customer form seems non-American (no Zip Code), there are a number of almost necessary add-ons and adding them all on is a tough process etc. And many people depend on it. I also see PHP security issues for all kinds of PHP projects all of the time, something else to work on.
I know C decently, and had an interest in optical character recognition, and a few years back GOCR was the best free OCR out there. As I was unused to contributing to large C projects it took me a little bit to wrap my head around the program, but ultimately I didn't have to completely - some programs split up functionality so that one only has to understand parts. I tested GOCR against many scans, saw where it made a lot of errors and then worked to improve its functionality for those mis-scanned letters - ultimately I did a patch. The maintainer disappeared for a few months so I gave up on submitting it, but then he returned, I made noise about my patch and he submitted a modified version of it.
Around that time, Google released the tesseract OCR in C++. It is superior to GOCR, but I do not know C++ as well as C, and its data structures (based on the common and abstract dawg and trie type data structures) are more complex than GOCR's, I have not had the time to wrap my head around it to contribute.
After learning some Java in a class, I felt I had little real-world experience in it, so I just searched through the bug reports in the most popular Sourceforge Java projects. I picked a sort of uncomplicated project, and a bug which was not that incredibly complex (but was not simple) and fixed it up. My patch was accepted.
I also had a problem with one of my programs on Ubuntu and got involved with it. This program calls libraries, which call other libraries, which call other libraries. So the bug reporting is a little off - people report bugs all over the place (Ubuntu bug tracking, Red Hat bug tracking, Debian bug tracking), but they don't always make it to the right place - a lot of the bugs need to be kicked upstream to the library maintainers. One bug which is happening was introduced during a certain commit, I discovered where it happened and patched the problem, but they have not accepted my patch yet. I am trying to learn the library (and the library the library depends on) so as to commit a better patch. But just my help in maintaining the bug tracking systems and coordinating them is being a help - I close tickets and email people that their problems have been patched and so forth - I do grunt work the people who know the coding language and the programs well do not want to do, so even in that aspect I am helping. Although I am working to understand the programs as well as they do.
Particularly on hardware. We're always playing catch up as new stuff comes out.
Hi, we are looking for volunteers to contribute to continue building the new generation web server for Linux: Monkey HTTP Daemon, please check http://www.monkey-project.com/ for more details, best regards,
Eduardo Silva http://edsiper.linuxchile.cl http://www.monkey-project.com
You can contact me thru the Realeyes forums on Sourceforge. The areas where I could use some help include:
- The sensor has its own memory management because of buffering requirements. This and the ways buffers are used and released by the analysis engine need improvement.
- I would like to port the DB interface from Java to C or C++.
- I would like to improve the DB exporting capabilities for better reporting and interfacing with other systems, such as problem ticketing systems.
- There are several features I would like to add to the user interface.
Later . . . Jim
The problem with people off the street who want to help is they usually have no idea what to do, and have a hard time fitting into the culture of a project.
I've got a guy right now with a lot of heart and some fair amount of skill who really wants to help, but I have to lead him along with a trail of bread crumbs, coming up with something for him to do at every turn, and finishing most of his projects. I like the guy a lot, but his help is too expensive to be useful.
The most useful people I've got are the ones who showed up one day with a patch that demonstrated their understanding of a problem, and of the project's culture. These people are our greatest asset, because I don't have time to micro-manage my team and make up daily to do lists. I need people who can see a problem, have the courage to make their own decisions as to the best way to solve it with minimal discussion and hand-wringing, and who will listen to criticism if it turns out they need to reconsider some aspect of the patch.
It pretty much sucks working under these conditions, because you have to make decisions that could turn out wrong, and you could have to go back to the drawing board and do things a different way. It would be so much cleaner if everyone could agree on everything ahead of time, and no work would be undertaken without a solid understanding of the problem at hand, and the exact solution the project will find satisfactory. Unfortunately, trying to work like that guarantees nothing will ever get done. The only way to drive progress at this project is to stick your neck out and do something, and go with your instincts. All those attempts at sorting everything out ahead of time lead to features that sit there on the board for five years unimplemented. A lot of the time, things emerge during the course of working on something that nobody would have even considered at the outset. As much as it sucks, I have to work under the same crappy conditions myself, and the fact that I'm the project manager doesn't give my own code a pass if I go off on a wrong track, and get called on it. It's a team effort, and to a large extent, the end users are part of that team too.
My job is more that of "culture keeper" than project manager. I have to make sure all the pieces fit together, and ensure a certain amount of consistency across the huge spectrum of different uses people have for our software. Individual developers tend to get hung up on their own way of working and looking at the software, and something that makes sense from one perspective might be actively detrimental to a different class of user with different objectives and usage habits. Of course, it's impossible to make everyone happy, and to accommodate all the extreme edge cases, so deciding where the middle ground will be is part of my job too.
The less work you make for me trying to channel your effort, the more welcome your contributions are. We're always hiring, but we don't advertise, because we've found most random people off the street who just want to help are completely useless at best. Working here sucks. It has all the bad qualities that make it a job, but there's no paycheck to help the bitter pill go down. The only reason anybody would ever work here is passion for our software.
Been thinking about it for a while... As I'm not a web developer, I could certainly use some help. You can find my contact on my site (mysettopbox.tv).
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
Drupal could desperately use a free, functional, open source chat room. The current solutions are either expensive, or insanely buggy!
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.