Monday, 13th of October 2008 at 02:36:40 AM
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I had a pretty interesting conversation with a computer programmer today, he was asking me if i knew any open source projects that are stopped, stuck, or too new and in need of software developers.
Well the truth is that all software projects are in need of contributors but new open source contributors usually find it a bit difficult to suggest a project thats “newbie friendly”, so do i. I always believed in the wisdom of the crowds so in that spirit i would like to invite the readers of this blog to comment on which projects they believe are “newbie friendly” and “why is that so?”.
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Well, projects that are “stopped, stuck or too new and in need of software developers” is quite different from “newbie friendly” projects — I’d say that in fact they’re opposite.
If you’re looking for the first, I recommend
http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org/
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Faidon Liambotis i think you are right… although that site is very interesting.
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I’d encourage folks to participate in new projects rather than older and/or unmaintained ones.
FWIW, shamelessly doing some “blessing of our beards” here (‘βλογάμε τα γένεια μας), there are a few tickets in Transifex marked as ‘easy_task’s:
http://transifex.org/report/9
And I could create many more if there is a need for it.
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Dimitris as usual your input is more than welcome! Hmmm… nice idea marking some tickets as “easy task’s”! Any other projects doing so?
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In Ubuntu’s bug tracker (launchpad bugs), easy to fix bugs are tagged with ‘bitesize’ or ‘string-fix’. For more info, see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Tags.
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Yes, I agree that stuck projects aren’t the easiest ones to pick up. It depends of course on the definition of “newbie”, someone who is new to open source, but an experience programmer might indeed help, while someone who is still struggling with basics of programming and project handling might be lost fast.
More important IMHO: Apart from “what state is the project in?”, a good question would also be “is there one of the projects developers around close geographically, so a new dev could get a hands-on start?”
Of course lots of open source projects work very well in a wide geographical distribution, but when you’re new to the game a bit of direct “show me” goes a long way. If the programmer who posed the question in the start is in Greece, he might hop in a bus to Patras and have Dimitris show him where to start – it might be more interesting to start with some real code then just to fix the line lenghts
(example just picked out randomly there).
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@ Thanos
Interesting since Ubuntu is so widely known to lots of people even outside the Linux ecosphere.
@ betabug
I think too that geographical proximity is usefull when you are trying to start contributing.
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