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The Linux distillery Finding open source project teams
The Linux distillery Finding open source project teams | Finding open source project teams |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 17 March 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 These are but two ways that non-programmers can be very important in a quality open source project. Of course, I don't want to go too far this way and imply that software developers themselves aren't important. In fact, far from it. After all, open source software is, well, software. It needs programmers to come to life no matter how tremendous the concept is.Ok, we need these guys. Let's find them. The largest collection of open source software projects is found at Sourceforge.Net. Drop by that site. Now, as chafing at the bit as we might be to kick off our great new idea, there's something we really ought to do first. And this is a vital part of getting a great open source project team together; it may be the good people come to you because they're passionate about the same idea. In other words, you might not actually start a new project and try and recruit but instead look first to see if you can join an existing one. Last time, I suggested you ought to have a raison d'être; you must consider carefully just what your software will do. Rather than decide to build a web browser, you might decide to build the fastest ever web browser. Or one which cleverly visualises site links. So, let's see what SourceForge offers. Go to its search page and search for the exact phrase "web browser." Straight away we get 662 results. The first match returned is the frighteningly-named Werewolf web browser which purports to be a lightweight web browser. That's not quite the same as a fast web browser, but perhaps you might share this project's ideals. At this time of writing there's only one team member too, so perhaps he'd be grateful for offers of assistance. Looking a bit further we find Internet Spirit Web browser. The author claims this is faster than Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera. So, if I wanted to make a new fast web browser perhaps I should look here: do I have a sufficient reason to compete with this product? Given this already has a release, can I make a bigger difference by contributing to it rather than starting from scratch? Perhaps you might look through the source code and find out your killer idea can actually improve the speed by a further 10%. Or, perhaps you might lament the fact it is presently Windows-only – but note that the language used is C++ and you could in fact make it Linux compatible by providing a GTK based user interface. Once again this project has only one team member at the time of writing, and he specifically says he's looking for help. All well and good, but how do you start your own project? CONTINUED |
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