About contribution
Posted: Tue Jan 04, 2005 9:04 pm
Dear XnView user,
the graphic viewer XnView has been around for several years, now. There's only few developers working on XnView, and basically the software XnView is the effort of one person: Pierre E. Gougelet.
Many people around the world like and use this graphic software. Some people even like the XnView project and want to help and contribute to it. They are called contributors. In this forum you can find quite a number of contributors: Basically all people answering and posting here (apart from Pierre) are contributors. There's ckit, and Dreamer, just to name two of them.
You might also be fascinated by this nice, compact graphic browser named XnView, which stands for Extended View, the enhanced, GUI based version of Pierre's graphic software 'view', by the way. And you might also think about helping and contributing to the project...
No Open source!
Before describing in more detail what you could do, you should understand and be aware of what kind of project XnView is:
XnView is not Open Source. XnView is Freeware, free for private usage. For commercial usage, licences have to be purchased and all of the money and Euros go to Pierre, the author of XnView. Contributors do not get any money, all the work is done voluntarily and for free.
Even if it is unlikely, the licence terms might change and XnView might not be freeware at all, anymore.
So why contribute?
All the above does not sound very promising and since XnView is no Open Source and basically driven by one person, possibilties to contribute and influence the whole project are limited and restricted.
Some people (like me) accept this and still see fun, personal or other benefit in contribution. You have to find out and decide yourself.
How to start...
Becoming a contributor for XnView is easy. There are many, many things to do, from little to large - which all help. If you do want to contribute, you can start right, now. As a basis you need knowledge of the capabilities and functionality of XnView. So you should first get familiar with XnView. You can learn about XnView by using it and reading the online help. By the time, you will know the software and it's features.
- XnView forum: Answering Questions and joining discussion
More and more people read this XnView forum and pose questions. Answering and clarifiying these questions is quite some work. Some of the questions are difficult and can be answered by Pierre or other experienced people, only. But there's also easier questions. If you know the answer to a question or have a comment/info to a post, feel free to post your answer or comment.
- XnView forum: Reproducing bugs
Often there's questions and requests for enhancements in the forum, but also bugs are reported. With bugs, often the most difficult thing is not to fix the bug, but actually making the problem reproducable on a second computer. So it helps a lot if one or more users also try to reproduce a specific bug report and write for example: "I can confirm this, the problem also occurs on Windows 2000".
- XnView forum: Testing
Right before a final release of a new XnView version is released, so-called Betas and Release Candidates are available in this forum. You can join testing the Betas and Release Candidates, report bugs that you find and try to reproduce and clarify bugs reported by other people. Currently, the testing of XnView 1.82 takes place.
Coordinated tasks
Larger tasks have to be coordinated. Coordination is needed to avoid parallel work on the same thing and make sure that there's no work done in vain. If you are interested in helping on a larger task, please do not just start. Instead, ask in one of the groups or contact Pierre or me.
Below a list of the larger task. Each larger task has an individual subgroup in the forum, just click on one of the tasks to get there and to read more about it:
- Translations: On-screen texts
Thank you for reading this post and thinking about contributing to the XnView project.
Greetings,
Helmut
the graphic viewer XnView has been around for several years, now. There's only few developers working on XnView, and basically the software XnView is the effort of one person: Pierre E. Gougelet.
Many people around the world like and use this graphic software. Some people even like the XnView project and want to help and contribute to it. They are called contributors. In this forum you can find quite a number of contributors: Basically all people answering and posting here (apart from Pierre) are contributors. There's ckit, and Dreamer, just to name two of them.
You might also be fascinated by this nice, compact graphic browser named XnView, which stands for Extended View, the enhanced, GUI based version of Pierre's graphic software 'view', by the way. And you might also think about helping and contributing to the project...
No Open source!
Before describing in more detail what you could do, you should understand and be aware of what kind of project XnView is:
XnView is not Open Source. XnView is Freeware, free for private usage. For commercial usage, licences have to be purchased and all of the money and Euros go to Pierre, the author of XnView. Contributors do not get any money, all the work is done voluntarily and for free.
Even if it is unlikely, the licence terms might change and XnView might not be freeware at all, anymore.
So why contribute?
All the above does not sound very promising and since XnView is no Open Source and basically driven by one person, possibilties to contribute and influence the whole project are limited and restricted.
Some people (like me) accept this and still see fun, personal or other benefit in contribution. You have to find out and decide yourself.
How to start...
Becoming a contributor for XnView is easy. There are many, many things to do, from little to large - which all help. If you do want to contribute, you can start right, now. As a basis you need knowledge of the capabilities and functionality of XnView. So you should first get familiar with XnView. You can learn about XnView by using it and reading the online help. By the time, you will know the software and it's features.
- XnView forum: Answering Questions and joining discussion
More and more people read this XnView forum and pose questions. Answering and clarifiying these questions is quite some work. Some of the questions are difficult and can be answered by Pierre or other experienced people, only. But there's also easier questions. If you know the answer to a question or have a comment/info to a post, feel free to post your answer or comment.
- XnView forum: Reproducing bugs
Often there's questions and requests for enhancements in the forum, but also bugs are reported. With bugs, often the most difficult thing is not to fix the bug, but actually making the problem reproducable on a second computer. So it helps a lot if one or more users also try to reproduce a specific bug report and write for example: "I can confirm this, the problem also occurs on Windows 2000".
- XnView forum: Testing
Right before a final release of a new XnView version is released, so-called Betas and Release Candidates are available in this forum. You can join testing the Betas and Release Candidates, report bugs that you find and try to reproduce and clarify bugs reported by other people. Currently, the testing of XnView 1.82 takes place.
Coordinated tasks
Larger tasks have to be coordinated. Coordination is needed to avoid parallel work on the same thing and make sure that there's no work done in vain. If you are interested in helping on a larger task, please do not just start. Instead, ask in one of the groups or contact Pierre or me.
Below a list of the larger task. Each larger task has an individual subgroup in the forum, just click on one of the tasks to get there and to read more about it:
- Translations: On-screen texts
Thank you for reading this post and thinking about contributing to the XnView project.
Greetings,
Helmut
I wasn't here specifically for localization.