Oh well, it’s time to write some nice job offer, of course it’s all
for free, and you can’t earn any money out of it, but you’ll get a
big thanks, hugs and love from the community. Ask your self, how
long have you been using FreeBSD. Months? Years? Decades? And you
love using it because of whatever reason but at the same time
you’re feeling a bit guilty to use it all for free without giving
anything back? Well now you’ll have the chance to change that.
We at FreeBSD are always in need of new people who are willing
to spare some of their time and effort into FreeBSD development.

Let me share a bit of my experience. I have (re)built a lot of
teams in the past, such as gecko@, kde@, python@, and I was
involved in the creation of FreeBSD vbox@ team. I have always
managed to get assistance from a lot of people, but recently more
and more people have started to complain about the slowness,
broken commits and requested for more Call for Testing. And that
is actually a big problem. I am the kind of person who like to
call for test, but I am also the kind of person who easily gets
disapointed when I’m not getting much feedbacks. The best example
here is ATI, Xorg and Xfce update. I did a call for testing because
Xorg and Driver updates is always a big issue because there are so
many different hardware involved with various configurations. From
the call for testing, we managed to get a total of 19 mails of
positive feedback and after 2 weeks I’ve committed the update.
What happened after that was I received a lot of complains for
not conducting much testing, yadda, yadda. Well I say it ain’t
my fault for not testing much, but it is also your fault for not
helping us. It is always easy to blame instead of helping. Ask
yourself why have you not helped us in testing properly and give
us feedbacks. Complaining is fine when it is done in the right
way, with the right tone.

While I’m talking about Xorg, the FreeBSD Xorg Team is currently
a one man show effort, supported by kwm@ and fluffy@. Xorg alone
is too big to get worked on. Plus you should not think that it is
affecting the ports only, but it affects the kernel as well, which
we are having the most problems at the moment. And of course I
would like to call for help on that as well. Based on my last call
for help, it is funny to see how many people wanted to offer some
help, but after knowing the amount of work involved, I have stopped
hearing from these guys. I understand that to update Xorg is always
a crappy job but I love doing it, because it is nice to get more and
more experience in understanding how things work, and it helps to
improve my skills a lot.

Lets a talk a bit about our FreeBSD KDE Team. KDE is nice, but it
really is a fat project. It needs a lot of love, and maintenance
time. Currently it’s a 4 people project, namely makc@, fluffy@ and
avilla@. While for support Raphael Kubo da Costa is handling it
actively. The thing is, KDE involves more than just KDE packages.
It includes Qt, PY-Qt, KOffice and Cmake as well. It is a big
project too and it would be nice to find more people to contribute
in the development.

And now lets talk about gecko@. gecko@ includes all Mozilla Project,
namely Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey. It is currently maintained
by beat@ and decke@, and supported by flo@ and andreas. So again,
I’d like to see some fresh faces for this project as well. If you are willing
to help, do ping us via mail :p.

As for FreeBSD Gnome Team, well I can’t say much about gnome but
whenever I see the cvs commits in marcuscome tree, it seems like
most work for the upcoming gnome3 is done by kwm@, and supported
by marcus@, mezz@ and avl@. Gnome includes not only Gnome things
but it also include gtk and cairo, the one that always cause
problems in a major update. I think the team would love to have
some fresh blood in the team.

Okay, all of these need an understanding of programming and
scripting. If you think that you can’t do any of that, testing would
also help much. FreeBSD is one of the best documented open source
project, so that’s another area that could use some help too. Check
if FreeBSD.org is available in your language, or start helping to
improve the FreeBSD documents in your language. It would be very
helpful and the community will thank you for that. So if you would
like to offer some help, ping me in irc/jabber/mail

- Martin