2.1. First, Look Around
Before starting an open source project, there is one important caveat:
Always look around to see if
there's an existing project that does what you want.
The chances are pretty good that whatever problem you want solved
now, someone else wanted solved before you. If they did solve it, and
released their code under a free license, then
there's no reason for you to reinvent the wheel
today. There are exceptions, of course: if you want to start a
project as an educational experience, pre-existing code
won't help; or maybe the project you have in mind is
so specialized that you know there is zero chance anyone else has
done it. But generally, there's no point in not
looking, and the payoff can be huge. If the usual Internet search
engines don't turn up anything, try searching on
http://freshmeat.net/
(an open source project news site, about which more will be said
later), on http://www.sourceforge.net/,
and in the Free Software
Foundation's directory of free software at
http://directory.fsf.org/.
Even if you don't find exactly what you were looking
for, you might find something so close that it makes more sense to
join that project and add functionality than to start from scratch
yourself.
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