What does it mean to contribute to OpenSolaris Communities and Projects? I work for the NFS group at Sun. That means when things really align, I can help out with the NFS Community in OpenSolaris. That community fits under filesystems, network storage, storage, and appliances. And some of those
align with my own interests. When I joined Sun, I told my manager I was going to contribute to OpenSolaris and I was going to blog.
I thought contributing to OpenSolaris would be in the form of coding. I couldn't have been more wrong and that was why it was a slow start for me. I found that I was blogging away merrily about how to use OpenSolaris and how it differed from Linux. That experience got me invited as a contributer to the Immigrants Community. I didn't realize that type of activity was just what I needed to be doing for OpenSolaris.
When I finally realized that, I started coming out of my shell with respect to OpenSolaris. I helped push the NFS Server in non-Global Zones project out into the community (and I still need to get the requirements doc started).
I was also sitting in a staff meeting when my manager 3 levels up (Bev Crair) said, "We should get Richard McDougall to blog about Mirror Mounts." I sent her email pointing out that I had already done that twice in the last couple of months (see Some fun with NFSv4 and automount across a ssh tunnel and How NFSv4 should work when crossing filesystems). She wasn't aware that I was a blogger-boy. Now she knows it and I'm on an internal bloggers list for Software.
After both of these events, Lynn Rohrer, contacted me and asked me if I wanted to be on an internal committee which met on the OpenSolaris Storage Community. It actually does more than that, we talk about Storage on BigAdmin and Solaris Developer Network (SDN). Before I knew what was happening, I was heavily involved in rewriting the Storage Community web page and tricked into writing two articles for the SDN.
And I got volunteered to help open up the Honeycomb project. Again, it is site management and not coding.
Am I bragging here? Kinda. But what I'm really trying to point out is that you don't have to be a coder to help drive a Community or a Project. There are plenty of non-coding tasks that need to be done to make this open source experience succeed.
And when you look at the projects and communities I've mentioned, please realize that there are many people involved across the board in getting great content up there. For the Honeycomb project, I did a lot of cut-and-paste, some editing, some research in tracking down people and blogs, etc. I was mainly glue and free cycles.
It is funny, when I first started out in OpenSolaris, I would hound away at people, asking them to put me on the contributor's list for a community or a project. I had one person tell me, "Grasshopper, when you have contributed enough, we will make you a contributor." Now that people know I will help out, I have to almost fight not to be on leader's lists for things.
The moral is that you have something to contribute to the success of OpenSolaris. It may be coding, but then again there is a lot more than code changes that need to be done in order to make this a vibrant open source community. Just help out where you can and it will be appreciated.
