After having been at JBoss for a while, I was surprise to see that there were not more people that volunteered to contribute to open source projects. At the time I just chalked it up to being a lack of time, money, or something like that which was really out the control of the open source community.

 

 

Recently I had someone who contacted me about contributing to the JBoss Remoting project and as I talked with him about the project, such as how to set up the project, where to get the documentation, how to lookup coding tasks, etc., he kept thanking me for my help. Finally I had to tell him that it was he who was helping me by contributing and that I would do whatever I could to help him. Besides him being a capable and nice guy, it was in my best interest for him to have everything I could reasonably afford to give. To me, this just made sense.

 

 

He then told me about a previous experience he had with another open source group and how it had left a bad taste in his mouth. The problems ranged from just getting help to make the build work to getting a project lead to respond to e-mails. One of his last comments pretty much summed it up for me, “yeah, its pretty much a very tight group.. who dont like "intruders" :) ”.

 

 

So am now starting to wonder if the reason more developers don’t contribute to open source projects is that they have the perception, real or not, that they are not welcome. It is certainly disappointing to think this might be their real reason as it is definitely not the case at JBoss. All you need is a compiler and a chair. Ok, it isn’t exactly that easy, but we really do want developers to contribute and to help in that process. For me, this is what open source is all about. Professional open source is even better since it takes a step further and removes the other barriers I talked about earlier (time and money).

 

 

So developers, take heed, the welcome mat is out for you at JBoss.

 

 

To find out how to get involved in the JBoss projects, visit our community page at http://www.jboss.org/community/index.

 

 

STAY OPEN!

 

 

-Tom