Ask HN: What open source project(s) should I work on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What open source project(s) should I work on?

2 pointsLeon4 comments

I have a lot of spare time lately, and I've finished most of my side projects that I've usually worked on that I found interesting.

Assuming that there are probably others looking to work on open source projects or that are already, what are some good projects to get involved with? Which ones seem the like they are on an interesting track and have room for future expansion? Which projects could be promising if they were brought back to life or had another developers time injected into its lifecycle?

There are so many projects that it is very difficult to really see what's going on with them, so I'm bringing this to you, the HN community. Maybe it'll even get some other people to join some of the projects.

I know that this topic does come around every now and then, but the OSS world changes often, it would be nice to know what needs help right now.

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I recommend FreeBSD. :-)

In all seriousness, every open source project can always benefit from more help... provided that it comes from someone who is interested in the project and is qualified to work on it. Moreover, people who come to a project saying "I want to get involved in open source, and I've picked this project" are usually nowhere near as successful as people who come to a project saying "I've been using this for a couple of years, and I've noticed these bugs... want some patches?"

So my recommendation is to simply start playing with open source software, and when you encounter something you think is wrong or could be improved, fix it.

Go with what's familiar and what I use? Sounds like good advice. But I'd still like to work on a project that needs help more than some of the bigger, more recognizable ones that already have droves of dev's trying to help.

What parts of the FreeBSD project could use some help?

EDIT: Their projects page is pretty cool, I might go with one of those projects then. http://www.freebsd.org/projects/projects.html

If you're interested in helping out FreeBSD, I'd look at the "ideas" list (http://www.freebsd.org/projects/ideas/) since that page is specifically intended for new contributors.

There's some interesting work happening in OpenFF, a open source social media effort. Also, might I suggest leveraging your talents on a project I have been working on for a couple of months but have had some technical difficulties with. The project concept can be found by doing a web search on Victus spiritus, Monetization web2010.

I'd like for much of the source to be open sourced but to eventually create some focal contextual search site driven by social media information. You can reach me at messel at gmail dot com if you're interested, we'd be happy to have a fresh perspective.

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