Section 7.2 Friendly Projects
The following are open source communities with a reputation of being friendly to novice contribution. Be sure to follow the recommendations given in Section 7.1 for getting started well.
Subsubsection 7.2.1 Firefox
The Mozilla Firefox Browser 1 proclaims itself to be the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
To get started contributing to Firefox:
- Carefully follow Getting Set Up To Work On The Firefox Codebase 4 .
- Read and follow How To Contribute Code To Firefox 5 .
Subsubsection 7.2.2 PreTeXt Authoring Software
PreTeXt is an XML-based authoring and publishing system for authors of textbooks, research articles, and monographs, especially in STEM disciplines. One of the many wonderful aspects of PreTeXt is that anything authored in this softwere is designed to be highly accessible so can be printed to the web, on pdf, in Braile, and more.
To get started with PretTeXt, do the following:
- Read the Contributing 6 Guide, and join the mailing lists described in the PreTeXt Contributing Guide.
- Install the PreTeXt-CLI 8 .
- Look for typo-level issues or issues marked by good first issue in Pretext Issue Queue 9
Subsubsection 7.2.3 Runestone Academy
The mission of Runestone Academy 10 is to make modern textbooks freely available to all (i.e. to democratize textbooks for the 21st century.) To accomplish this mission Runestone has partnered with many institutions, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), as well as many professors and other professionals to make high quality interactive textbooks in multiple languages available to all students for free.
To get started contributing to Runestone textbooks themselves, go to Runestone Academy Repos 11 , and look for textbooks. You will need your development environment set-up to build the textbook, either using Runestone git
The following textbooks are known to be friendly to novice contribution:
- This book! Open Source: What It Is and How to Contribute. 12
- How to Think Like a Computer Scientist 13 , an introductory textbook in Python.
- C++ for Python Programmers - author repo 16 and the original C++ for Python Programmers - forked repo. 17 Both repos have issue queues and are actively worked on.
- Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures Using C++. - author repo 18 and the original Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures Using C++ - forked repo. 19 Both repos are actively worked on.
Before trying to contribute to the Runestone Academy UI or database backend, it is best to gain practice contributing to books. To contribute to the Runestone Academy UI:
- Read the Contributing Guide 21 , paying particular attention to the required code style and linting section.
- Follow the directions on the Developing 22 page.
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