Ask HN: Do you actively contribute to open source projects?
If so, which project(s)? I'm curious how much overlap exists between startup hackers and open source hackers. I'm the Security Officer for the FreeBSD operating system... does that count? :-) EDIT: I should add that this is one of the main reasons I got started in the field of online backups: There were lots of online backup solutions available, but I wasn't impressed with their security -- and due to being FreeBSD Security Officer, I tend to have sensitive information (e.g., about unannounced security vulnerabilities in OpenSSL/BIND/Sendmail/Apache/etc), making it absolutely essential that my backups be secure. No, because you're just contributing to Microsoft... ;p I suppose somebody has to say it: No, I don't actively contribute to open source projects. No time, really. Yes, I actually just contributed my first patches for Rails this weekend (I think 3 or so got committed already) during the bugmash event. I definitely plan on making more contributions too. Define contribute? I tend to dabble in different things and contribute small patches for bug fixes, features etc. where I think it would be useful ;) My friends call it Ninja Hacking. I just submit bugs & crashes that happen on my Ubuntu system. Otherwise, I've been trying to contribute something to open source but in vain. Work daily on, but then that is my job. :) I contributed a lot of code to Caudium back in the early 00's even going to the Pike/Caudium conference in Paderborn, Germany in 2003 (which is quite an expensive proposition for someone from New Zealand).
My biggest open source project at the moment is a Pike library which reads in packets from libpcap and builds a table of active TCP and UDP flows, including all the metadata about the flows (and optionally the payload) with various callbacks so that you can easily build analysis, diagnostic, accounting or logging applications. I open-sourced our help ticket system: http://github.com/bigfolio/big-help/tree/master And I'm releasing an open-source image archiving app soon. I'll admit, I'd love to contribute to a larger open-source project but I feel intimidated at times. Sometimes I'm not sure I have anything to bring to the table for such projects ... considering the talent that already works on them. I wouldn't say I actively contribute. However, I do contribute when I need something done. For example, I need Spree (open source Rails e-commerce) to handle s3 downloads so I created and open sourced the s3 download extension. I needed attachment_fu (Rails attachment plugin) to use the GD library, so I forked and added that, which later got merged back in. I don't regularly spend a ton of time on open source stuff, but if I need it, I do it. I currently work on the Haiku project as a part of Haiku Code Drive. I wish to become a full time contributor once I'm done with the Code Drive. Also, I might start writing a FOSS app of my own in the future. It's just an itch I want to scratch. I can contribute to FOSS because I'm still in college. I guess people with jobs or startups might not have enough time for, um, "extra-curricular" activities. We're the main contributors to http://dotcloud.org Open-source system automation for the cloud. Yes. I have contributed patches to FFMpeg, was the OS X AzSMRC dev for a while, and I have a very large patch in progress for QEMU. I've contributed a few patches to unladen-swallow, but most of my time is spent contributing to Django (I'm the multi-db guy :P) I contribute to the Fedora Project's Infrastructure. Specifically the pkgdb: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb I've also contributed extremely insignificant patches to django and turbogears. I'm not a startup hacker though... I did reasonably significant work on the ModelJUnit project for several months, but these days I'm back to concentrating on my own crazy schemes. Yes, I work full time on https://launchpad.net/ Um, I open source my own projects at github.com/maryrosecook Does that count? Yes, assuming they could possibly have use for others. :) I contribute actively to BRLCAD. Although I do get paid to do it. Core developer of Hypertable (http://hypertable.org/). Had patches accepted in Git, Reviewboard, Thrift, etc. I've released a series of PHP scripts for personal (young) webmasters under the GPL if that counts. I just started up the iPhone ARKit. An Apache licensed Augmented Reality toolkit for the iPhone Yes, I'm one of the two core contributors to/maintainers of the Greasemonkey Firefox extension. I work on GPLd code at work, but it is not distributed, so that doesn't really count. I contributed a bit to Apertium (a machine translation system). yes, i'm an openbsd developer (though not contributing much these days). i've contributed patches to a number of other small projects that i don't keep track of. my one-man show: http://binaryage.com No