Hot Open Source Projects

[vickyrare]

Hot Open Source Projects:

Open Office,
Aka Microsoft Office written in Java.

NetBeans,

Its an IDE for programming C++ and Java, very big and complex.

Eclipse,

Its an IDE for like Netbeans, much bigger and complex then NetBeans.

JUnit,
Its a unit testing framework for Java language, not that big but still needs good skills to tackle this.

Valgrind,
Its a profiling + code coverage + memory leak detector tool. Needs advance memory management knowledge.

SQLite,
Apache Derby,
PostgreSQL,
MySQL,
These all are Database Management System. You need to understand all database concepts. Good understanding of system level applications is needed here.

zlib,
Its a compression library. Familiarization with compression algorithms is essential.

libpng,
Library to open,read and write PNG files. You have to be good with writing data drivers.

Freetype,
Font library, which allows to display and manipulate fonts.

JFreeChart,
Library to draw pretty graphs and charts on Java platform.

My opinion is that these mentioned Open Source projects are relatively big and complex. Most of the projects are written in C++. You have to be good with C++ and Java, else you are wasting your time here. All these projects need high level understanding of how software works both inside and outside. No need to come close to them, if you don't how to program in C++ and Java. Only for them if you think you are experienced enough.

In order to contribute to any open source project, you should know what the project is about.
Must be familiar with any Linux based OS, as most of the open source projects are based on Linux.
Must be good with C++ and Java.
You must know how to use the end product of any project.
You must know how to compile open source projects on your machine.
You must know how to run open source projects on your machine.
How to debug the code.
How to detect bugs.
How to write unit tests.
How to create patch.
How to apply patch to the code.

For people who doesn't have following skills should try to get these skills.

[Lars]

I'd say OpenOffice looks great..

[katana]

Where is VLC ?