How to Contribute to an Existing Open Source Project

Open source projects are open to contributions from anyone. In fact, many open source projects can languish without contributions from the community. Since open source software is written by volunteers and is free, programmers often need to devote time to other projects. Even people who aren't able to contribute code can still contribute to the project in other forms.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Contribute Patches

1. Identify a problem with the software. Find a bug, performance problem or enhancement you'd like to make.
2. Download source code from CVS and fix the problem.
3. Make a patch, using the diff program.
4. Send the patch in. The developers will integrate the patch into the CVS source code and the problem will be fixed in the next release.

Be Active in the Community

5. Sign up for any forums or mailing lists related to the project. Open source projects are built on communication. There will often be forums or mailing lists that are either officially or unofficially related to the project.
6. Ask and answer questions. Communities with no communication die. Even if you're just asking questions and getting people talking, you're helping the community. Even better than asking is answering questions, since you're helping more people use the software and strengthening the community.

Write Documentation

7. Create documentation. Open source projects often have poor documentation and help files. You can contribute to an existing project by writing documentation for it.
8. Find a section where the documentation is lacking or missing. This happens often for new features, where no one has gotten around to documenting them yet.
9. Write new documentation and send it to the developers. If what you wrote was acceptable, meaning it contained good grammar and accurate information, they will add it to the documentation.
10. Contribute to the project's wiki. Writing small documents on how to do common tasks is a good place to start. Wikis are often more helpful than the product documentation and anyone can contribute to them at any time. You can also improve other people's wiki entries by fixing grammar and formatting mistakes, checking facts or expanding on subjects.

Contribute Artwork

11. Create artwork. Many times, entire open source projects are made up of programmers who can write code but are not, by trade, artists. If you're artistically inclined, you can contribute by creating icons, splash screens, mascots or the like.
12. Improve the artwork and send it to the developers.

Tips & Warnings

• Running a website for an open source project is a particularly valuable way to contribute to the project. Since programmers are often very busy people, existing websites for open source projects are often minimal and sparse with little or no design. Having someone else design and maintain a website gives the developers more time to work on the project.

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