MJ Ray wrote:
However, 14 other VMware products are not, AFAICT. Also, one may study qemu and adapt it to your needs (such as FreeBSD support), or have it adapted, in a free market way, and its licensing does not limit your server memory size, or impose other bizarre arbitrary restrictions.
I recently decided to do precisely this (not with Qemu, but with a GPL licenced home accounts package), and I quickly realised just how much stuff I don't know (and need to know) just to get started.
In this case the package is cross-platform and uses wxWidgets, but the instructions I had to get set up were Windows based (using the free-as-in-beer MS Visual C++ Express as the compiler), and I decided to follow that route (for a whole range of reasons which aren't relevant here). The problems I had getting started were probably fairly generic, though.
I realised that whilst I've occasionally used CVS in the past I didn't really know what I was doing with SVN, so that was hurdle number one. Installing all the relevant libraries and getting all of those to compile was a major hurdle (and I'd like to think it was because of the platform I was on but I don't really think that's true). Getting the actual application to compile when I got that far was easy, but then (it surprised me to realise) I didn't know how to generate diffs (again the platform didn't help, but I wouldn't actually have been any more able under Linux). And I'm fairly technically literate, have been coding in various languages since I was about 11 (ZX81 basic!!), and I really should know better.
So the point I'm getting at is that the barrier to entry to FOSS development seems very high and I couldn't find any simple getting started guides (maybe I didn't look far enough). SVN is one of those packages which is really well documented, but I didn't need that - I just wanted to get the latest code onto my PC, know how to get updates, and how to submit patches. wxWidgets is similarly well documented but I simply couldn't compile it, and to be honest probably shouldn't have needed to: binary library files would have been enough for what I wanted to do.
There are so many applications out there which probably just need one or two line fixes here and there to improve them, but whilst the code change might take a few minutes (in my case that is how long it took to fix the bug that I was hunting for) it took about a fortnight of playing around to get to a position where I could start. (And doesn't C++ take a long time to compile!) // Not sure if this is just a rant, or whether I'm asking for help somewhere. If there is a good "getting started in FOSS development" book I'd like to know about it. Something with a bright yellow colour aimed at "Dummies" might be useful! But these days teaching kids to use computers in school means teaching them to use office (and usually Office[tm]) applications, not teaching them how to program. FOSS is missing a trick if the barrier to entry can't be lowered so that the ideal of fixing those bugs that annoy you then submitting them back to the community can actually be achieved by a moderately competent person in the real world.