Ken> Last week I was stuck. I had a broken SUN sparc64 ULTRA ONE. I Ken> asked WLUG for help. John Stoffel rose to the bait. My SUN now Ken> works better than ever. (We installed four fast ethernet ports Ken> thereby replacing a broken old fashioned eth0.) Thank you Ken> (publicly) John. I have another question. You're more than welcome. I was happy to help out, even though it took a while due to our schedules being out of sync. :] Ken> I am a retired computer programmer. I ended my professional days Ken> as a Senior Software Engineer for CISCO Systems in 2004. I am Ken> getting bored. (and my 401k is getting hit). I am curious as to Ken> whether I can contribute to an Open Source project. How do I Ken> join an open source community? Are they all parts of large Ken> corporations or schools? I just read that CISCO is embracing the Ken> open source idea. Oh course, I shall get hold of them. Ken> Do any of you have some knowledge on this subject? Depends on what kind of programming you want to do: low level drivers, OS internals, application, GUI, etc. Just find a project that interests you, join the developers mailing list, start to learn 'git' (or subversion or mercurial) for distributed development and then jump in. Oh, it also depends on which language(s) you are familiar with and want to program in as well. John