Gnome and all its glory!

When roaming the gnome empathy site I found some interesting things. I couldn't really find anything on history about the project but when I looked at the team wiki, some of my teammates had already been searching around for history so I decided to go another route. I found that there was an Outreach Program for Women. It was a chance for women to apply to help contribute to the gnome project and work with an experienced mentor. They were accepting women that could contribute in any aspect of the project. They also get paid a stipend of $4500, which I thought was crazy for 3 months of working with someone directing you most of the time! Anyway, this page led me to another one which had a list of all projects related to the Gnome desktop and mentors for each. They encourage people to contact and get some direction which I thought was a really good to lure people into helping with the project. I am excited to hopefully get some pointers on the easy things we can do to contribute to the project. But first we are gonna try to decide on which bugs to work on fixing.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

So we were supposed to read this article called The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It is about a man named Eric Steven Raymond and his experiences when he first discovers and dabbles into the open source world. One thing he said I think is really important, "too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the Linux world—which may explain why the average quality of software originated in the Linux community is so high." This definitely shows that open source software is a good place to learn/help with coding. He also has about 20 rules that he threw into his article and each one is an amazing tip to keep in mind while diving into the open source world. 

I also signed up for the mailing list and the IRC for Gnome Empathy. This took exponentially less time than reading the article.  

Choosing our projects...

So last class we got together in our groups and searched around some sites with lists of humanitarian free open source software (HFOSS). Each one of us selected a couple of projects and presented them to each other. We narrowed our selections(mainly tony's) to three. Our top three were GNOME Empathy, OpenRemote, and OpenKinect. GNOME empathy which is a messaging project that supports voice, video chat and some other features. It definitely seems to be the most developed and has a ton of help links that will help us along the way. Our next selection is called OpenRemote, it is used for developing touch-driven control panels. This project has some documentation but not a lot along the lines of a mailing list but they do have a chat room. Our third choice is called OpenKinect, this project focuses on using the xbox's new kinect and modifying to do several different things and so you can use it on the computer. We haven't decided yet on what our final choice is but we are going to decide before our next class. So until next time....

First Day

This is my first time blogging, so we will see how this goes....It's kind of nice starting class back up but of course it is bitter sweet. I didn't want the nice long break to end but it has to some time. So for the first day of class we were talking about what we did all we would do in the class and we got into groups. I am really excited to see what all we are going to add to an open source project of our choice. My group seems like a solid one, the other group members are James G, Tony A,  and Ashley K. Also I just signed up for POSSCON '11 and I am really excited to go and hear all the speakers.