Contribute

Here's a chance to be a part of a great new open source project. There are 3 types of developers LinuxMCE needs:

1. Maintainers for the existing open source projects incorporated in LinuxMCE: Although LinuxMCE is new (March 07), it consolidates a lot of existing open-source projects, like Ubuntu, Xine, MythTV, Pluto, Asterisk, etc. So it would be very helpful to have some developers from those existing projects join the team to be sure changes to those projects don't break LinuxMCE, and that LinuxMCE always includes the latest and greatest versions.

2. Add new open source projects to LinuxMCE: Because LinuxMCE does so much and has such broad and varied features brought together as one, and is essentially a framework for allowing lots of open source projects to seamlessly work together, there's lot's of other great open source projects out there that it would be nice to integrate into LinuxMCE. It makes LinuxMCE better, of course, when it does more, but also for the existing open source projects that are brought into LinuxMCE, it adds a ton of new features and benefits and makes them even more useful. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And this ability to tightly tie together lots of different software is where Open Source blows away traditional closed source. In the closed source world, you could never see all the various competing software companies work together and share their code so it all seamlessly combines.

3. Totally new code for LinuxMCE: Most of the functionality in LinuxMCE is already complete, and in general adding 'major' new features is a matter of integrating an existing open source project, rather than writing all new code from scratch. However, because LinuxMCE does so much and talks to so many devices, there are lots and lots of devices out there it would be nice to add support for. I'm hoping to be able to get some companies to sponsor a lot of this work, since this would open up a new market for them. It's my goal to drum up as much interest in LinuxMCE as I can so that there's a sizeable installed base of users, and that the manufacturers of home electronics devices will add LinuxMCE support for their products, or help sponsor the development.

In addition to developers we also need:

4. Documentation: This is probably our weakest point right now. It's hard to get the full benefit of LinuxMCE because a lot of the features are not well documented.

5. QA/Testing: I have setup an automated build system that creates a new test release each night, and a bug tracking system. Since programmers never like to test and debug, yet that's what matters most when building a user base, we really need some detail oriented people to stress LinuxMCE and go through all the functions to flush out all the bugs.

If you'd like to join the team, feel free to dive right in add yourself to the Contacts page. If you'd like some orientation and assistance, you'll find my contact info there too (Paul Webber), and I'd be happy to email, IM, Skype or phone you and chat with anybody interested in joining the team.