If you are looking to join the OpenSCAP team, a good way to begin is to start listening. Join the mailing list and find us on IRC and start asking questions. You can also start following the blogs of our main developers, where you can find the latest news and upcoming features. Take a look into News section to see their latest posts.
Are you a student interested in a diploma or bachelor’s thesis related to OpenSCAP? Check out the ideas page.
There is a nice summary of different ways to contribute in the article 14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Genius or a Rock Star by Andy Lester.
There are many ways to get involved. Let’s find the right one for you…
You are a You want toFix a concrete bug, add new feature, or port the tool(s) to new platform.
Contribute a new security profile or enhance the existing ones.
Verify correct functionality of the tools or perform proper bug triage.
Improve the way things are presented and help make everything smoothly integrated.
All of our projects are hosted on GitHub. If you’re not familiar with git or GitHub yet, you can have a look at the standard git workflow and GitHub workflow.
The best way to introduce yourself to the community and get familiar with the code of a particular project is to review existing code changes. Reviewing a code change is just as important as creating the code change in the first place – the project cannot evolve with enough flexibility if there are not enough responsible reviewers of proposed changes.
View moreAs implied by the git and GitHub workflows, code development on GitHub is performed using the following stages:
Let’s say that you have decided to contribute to the OpenSCAP Base project and you are already familiar with basic usage. A good way to start is to open GitHub’s issues tracker and pick an issue. If you already have an issue and its solution, submit a pull request using the GitHub UI and we will review your code – check contribute.adoc for more details. If you are not sure which issue to chose ask us on IRC.
All of our tools have their support section where you can find information how to contribute to that project.
Do you know Linux server administration and maintenance inside out? Are you interested in writing security policies? Users of the SCAP ecosystem need both tools and content. Security specialists typically contribute to security policy prose, and then work to turn the texts into automated SCAP content. The skills required have a lot of overlap with the developer role, but a great security specialist is often also a very good administrator.
If you have a keen eye for detail, or even just a knack for breaking things, you can help us with testing. Good testing directly contributes to stability, and is an excellent way for people of all backgrounds to make a valued contribution to the project.
Are you interested in Linux security? Do you enjoy writing concise, to-the-point user documentation? We realize that software can only be as useful as its documentation. The state of the SCAP ecosystem documentation is gradually improving but we always appreciate help.
If you are a user experience designer (such as an information architect, interaction designer, or user researcher), you can also contribute. If you see some places where the user experience could be improved, let us know about it on our mailing list. There are many tools to work with and there always is something to improve. Sometimes you can find a mistake which can be easily fixed – if so, help us. You do not have to be a developer to contribute. 🙂
