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By Tony S.
I’m an IT professional with about 5 years of experience of Unix
system programming under Solaris and HP-UX, if I don’t count the
experience under my studying period. I have a job, a wife and a kid
(hey, this may be enough already to disqualify me as a Free
Software hacker?). Of course, my experience is only in application
development, but I have been dreaming of contributing to kernel
development. I feel that the situation is the same even if I wanted
to contribute to WINE or SAMBA or any piece of Free Software.
Well, I may be very stupid, but I find that the threshold to
start producing something is very high. I think that there are many
people in my situation, many of them much more experienced than I
am. It takes a very long time to find the necessary info and to
start doing something for a new-comer even if it is an experienced
person. Since we do not have so many hours to spend on this every
week, by the time we think that we are getting into something, the
code and maybe some important API’s are likely to have changed a
lot.
It is very important that info is made available, and that it is
both concise and accurate. I am talking about some design
specifications, or an overall description of the code, for each
product. Development of Free Software would certainly accelerate a
lot if you could get experienced, but busy people to
contribute.
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