“There are many open source projects floating around on the Web.
They take on various forms and include software from operating
sytems (such as Linux) to Web servers (Apache), and browsers
(Mozilla) to development tools and languages (Perl)….”
“Now let`s discuss a particular open source project to
illustrate exactly how one might go about making contributions to
the open source community. For this example, I have chosen a
project operating under the auspices of the Apache Software
Foundation, the Jakarta Project http://jakarta .apache.org….”
“So, Jakarta is bringing standard Java Servlet and JSP support
to Apache, and doing it in an open, collaborative, source-shared
manner….”
“Participation on the mailing lists is a good way to get
started. You can get a feel for the developer discussions and the
project`s intracacies by reading the development lists while you
simultaneously download the current source trees, and practice
building and using the software on your own system….”