Ken Jones wrote:

Last week I was stuck. I had a broken SUN sparc64 ULTRA ONE. I asked WLUG for help. John Stoffel rose to the bait. My SUN now works better than ever. (We installed four fast ethernet ports thereby replacing a broken old fashioned eth0.) Thank you (publicly) John.

I have another question.

I am a retired computer programmer. I ended my professional days as a Senior Software Engineer for CISCO Systems in 2004. I am getting bored. (and my 401k is getting hit). I am curious as to whether I can contribute to an Open Source project. How do I join an open source community?

Joining up with an open source project is quite simple. It pretty much boils down to: - pick the project you want to join - sign up for the mailing lists, and probably issue trackers and a wiki - read up on the current state of the project (bonus if it has a "future plans" document somewhere - start asking questions on the mailing lists - pick a piece that looks interesting, and start writing and submitting code Writing documentation is nearly always a good place to start. Many projects have docs that are incomplete, or out of date, and writing docs doesn't require nearly the same level of initial work to get started that writing actual code does.

Are they all parts of large corporations or schools? I just read that CISCO is embracing the open source idea. Oh course, I shall get hold of them.

Some are, but quite a few have no such backing affiliation. Even many of the ones that have a backer now, didn't initially. The Bacula project, one I'm moderately active in, started off as a pet project by a couple of programmers. Now, the primary programmer is actually building a consulting business around it. Another one, the Puppet configuration management system, was written by the author as a tool to help him in his job as a sysadmin consultant. He chose to open source it, in the hopes that it could be useful to others, and that others, finding it useful, would contribute back to it. Both are coming true, and as a result he has a tool that's far more powerful than anything he could have written completely on his own. In the end, the one common thread you're likely to find among the vast majority of open source communities is a small group - often one or two people - would had a particular itch that they could not scratch, and so decided to start up their own project to fix it. As programs like linux and the various GNU software show, that kind of deep motivation can produce impressive results, even without the traditional corporate support structure. -- Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that WPI Senior Network Engineer | is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken GPG fingerprint = 6174 1257 129E 0D21 D8D4 E8A3 8E39 29E3 E2E8 8CEC

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