Re: [OT]: Sort-of. What's the best way to 'contribute'
deFreese, Barry said:
> Since my posts usually get ignored we'll see what happens with this one.
> :-)
>
> Since I don't have a great deal of money yet (When I win the lottery I
> promise to send big checks to Debian and Samba!! :-) ) what is the best
> way to contribute to the open source community? I've poked around on
> sourceforge to see if I could lend a hand but many of the projects that I
> found are probably a little over my head at this juncture. The
> initiative here is two-fold.
I think one of the best ways someone can contribute is to learn the
system well, help others where you can, and promote it where you work
and with people that you know(I don't mean buying linux bumper stickers
and T-shirts). E.g. at my last company I started and almost all the
production servers were redhat, nobody in the company knew debian the
closest they came to it was corel linux(the company bought a division
of corel which is why they knew it). A year later perhaps 75% of the
production servers were debian, 2 years later about 90% were. Many
people knew what it was, and a good deal of the developers started using
it on their own systems(either at work or at home or both).
I'm pretty happy with the results.. the company itself isn't in
the best of shape, but at least the IT department contributed to
a lot of cost cutting by using open source / free software(example:
we avoided a $10k ticketing system by using WebRT, we avoided having
to have a dedicated NT webserver to generate FlexLM/win32 license
keys by using wine(and it is rock solid!))
And of course I learned a great deal in the process.
If your up to it, contribute bug reports, patches, documentation
but this isn't my thing. Another possiblity is to purchase(or encourage
your company) to purchase commercial versions of (otherwise) open
source software e.g. staroffice vs openoffice. Or donate to some
of the various projects.
don't rush though. there's no rush.. take your time and learn the
system.
nate
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