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Part of being an open source project includes accepting contributions from the user community. When members of the user community contribute code to a project, everyone benefits. In this chapter, we explain why contributions are helpful, and we expalin how to make contributions.
People who have limited experience with open source projects may not be familiar with the ideas surrounding user contributions. Because users have direct access to the source code, they have the opportunity to fix bugs, add new features, and otherwise improve the project. When users make such changes, they send them to the development team for inclusion in the next release.
VR technology as a whole is stagnating with its closed source solutions. This means that anyone new to VR need to completely develop a new solution, often inferior than others. Releasing an open VR system is vital to the development of VR. Now instead of reimplementing VR systems, people can focus on implementing new VR ideas and methods all relying on this standard technology to be there, and free from cost or legal ties.
Because VR Juggler will benefit from your efforts, that's why! As an OpenSource project, we want your help, your input, your ideas, and most of all, your code contributions. You don't have to be a hot-shot, fast CPUs, fast downloads programmer to contribute. VR Juggler is a big project, and it is still growing. Whether your background is in UNIX-based systems or Win32, you can help. We want motivated, creative people to help us make VR Juggler the world's best virtual reality platform. If you're still not convinced, take a look at the rest of this page for some more motivation.
Only the most trivial software is bug free, and VR Juggler is certainly non-trivial. We do our best to track down and fix bugs, but our fly swatter is only so big. If you find a bug, then by all means, submit a bug report and give us a patch! Don't worry, we won't be too embarrassed.
As with most projects, the features present in VR Juggler are those deemed necessary by the developers and users. New features are added, but the developers with commit access only have so much time each day to devote to the advancement of the source. With a growing user base and advances in the field of virtual reality, new features help everyone. If you have an idea or some earth-shattering code, we want to see it!
Everyone in the field of virtual reality has differing ideas, goals and equipment. If VR Juggler is to prove usable as the basis for advanced (and not-so-advanced) virtual reality applications, it will need to provide support for the needs of as many users as possible. Getting to this point means that missing features need to be added by someone. Eventually, the current developers could find the time to meet everyone's needs, but those needs can be met faster with the help of contributors.
The most obvious case of a missing features is a driver for Device X. VR Juggler provides a highly flexible mechanism for adding a device driver to the source. If you have driver source code for a currently unsupported device, chances are that driver can be added to VR Juggler easily.
Other examples of missing features can include a wide variety of extensions. To save yourself time, it would be best to discuss your ideas in a public VR Juggler forum (insert vrjuggler-devel link) first so that you can get feedback on whether your ideas are applicable to the VR Juggler core or would be better suited to a higher-level tool.
The VR Juggler team loves what it does and is excited about VR Juggler and its continued development. We are, however, a small group with big ideas and busy schedules. We want your help because, with support from many bright, creative developers, we think that VR Juggler can achieve these big goals and more.