Volunteers Wanted (HOW TO GET INVOLVED)
Okay so I've been getting mails telling me about various deployments and helping people out with problems. In general I do prefer those be posted here in this forum, but it is a different convention than most of the JBoss forums (they strongly divide between user and dev) and I can understand how it could be a little intimidating to post here. Anyhow, we've got a few really great volunteers but we could still use some more help. This project is run a little different than many other JBoss projects. Maybe its my Apache background, maybe I'm more of a hippy, I dunno. Anyhow, like most JB projects we have a general road map, and we have lists of features and bugs. However, if someone has a real cool idea and they can implement it (not "hey lets refactor everything to my other way of doing things for some fairly subjective benefit" but "hey it would be really cool to have support for XYZ"), we certainly won't turn you down! One of my goals is always to try and get not only the regular suspects of open source but bring in new contributors.
I do recommend anyone getting seriously involved buy two books:
ISBN 0-672-32114-9 and
ISBN 0-672-32581-0
Books on two very different mail servers with different feature sets. Good ideas in both.
If you need more of a hand holding and want some easy issues to delve into first please ask here or you can feel free to email me at acoliver@jboss.org. Or you can even look on the roadmap in jira.jboss.com. There are features and bugs with various estimates.
While there is plenty on the internet about the benefits of open source (for a scholarly but easy read:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WEBSUC.html), I always do this for folks who get heavily involed:
* I let skilled regular contributors use me as a reference
* I recommend "scholarships" to relevant JB trainings (because they generally come back and do something cool right after that they hadn't thought of before)
Other reasons folks get involved:
* Day jobs are boring and they don't get to do challenging stuff that stretches their geek mojo.
* Fight "the man"
* Online code samples that you can actually refer people to
* Its fun
* They like the project and agree with the goals and want to see it succeed
* They need XYZ in their day job that uses JBMS or could use JBMS
* They want to work here (we already had one contributor hired)
* 'cause