From Developer Community

Participating in Open Source Software Projects

This website hosts many open source software projects. Novell promotes and/or is involved in many of these projects, but not all of them. Most of these projects were started by other individuals just like you that wanted to solve a problem.

Often people make the mistake of thinking that getting involved with an open source project is kind of like signing up for an anything-goes free club membership. This is an erroneous perception of open source. You can't just go to a project and become a project member just because you want to be.

At a fundamental level, your level of influence in an open source project is based upon trust, and the level of trust you have is earned through your contributions to the project. "But," you ask, "how do I contribute to a project if I am not a member?" There are a few ways to start contributing:

• First, become a user. Use the software to do real work. Ask questions about the project. When you find flaws or think of potentially new features, submit a bug report or a feature request.
• Become involved in the collaboration on a project. Sign up for the mailing lists, monitor the forums, ask questions. Answer the questions of others as you gain experience.
• Submit a patch. Find a bug that you can fix, or a new feature you want to add. Fix the bug or implement the feature, create a patch, and submit it back to the project. You will want to consult with the project maintainers to find out about their coding and patch standards and how they want their patches submitted.
• Ask to help. Often, people will just post to the mailing list and ask to help. You are welcome to do this and probably won't get flamed for doing so, although more than likely they will tell you to do one of the three items above.

Over time, after you establish a history of useful contributions, you may be given an opportunity to assume more control and actually check changes into the source code repository.

Assisting with SDKs, APIs, and Sample Code

Novell is working to make more of our SDKs, APIs, and sample code open so that it is usable and modifiable by all. We welcome your ideas and contributions in these areas.

When it comes to working with sample code in particular, we recommend some additional reading to help clarify some particular issues around sample code submissions.

Contributing to Wiki Documentation

We are putting much of our developer documentation into the wiki because we welcome your contributions. Don't think of this as Novell's documentation - think of it as your documentation. It is a wiki, so edit it where appropriate.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when contributing to our wiki documentation. We recommend you read Guidelines for Submitting Developer Content to clarify these issues.

• Help
• Discussion
• Edit
• History

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