Preface
Keeping your skills current in today's world is becoming increasingly challenging. There are
too many new technologies being developed, and little time to learn them all. The DB2®
on Campus Book Series has been developed to minimize the time and effort required to
learn many of these new technologies.
Who should read this book?
This book is a good starting point for beginners to the open source world. It is specially
written to equip students, and open source enthusiasts with the norms and best practices
of open source. You should read this book if you want to:
Educate yourself on the objectives of open source
Understand open source software licensing requirements
Get an introduction to the norms followed in the open source world
Join the open source movement and begin contributing.
How is this book structured?
The first chapters of this book discuss the history of open source software development
and its licensing requirements. It then talks about how organizations use open source as
their business model. Chapter 4 introduces the reader to the tools used in the development
of an open source project. Chapters 5 and 6 take the reader into more details about how to
contribute to an existing open source project. Chapter 7 provides a case study where you
practice contributing to an open source project. Chapter 8 goes a bit deeper describing the
Technology Explorer for IBM DB2, an open source project hosted at sourceForge.net; it
also summarizes and revisits some of the concepts discussed in the previous chapters.
Exercises are provided with most chapters. There are also review questions in each
chapter to help you learn the material; answers to review questions are included in
Appendix A.
A book for the community
This book was created by the community; a community consisting of university professors,
students, and professionals (including IBM employees). The online version of this book is
released to the community at no-charge. Numerous members of the community from
around the world have participated in developing this book, which will also be translated to
several languages by the community. If you would like to provide feedback, contribute new
material, improve existing material, or help with translating this book to another language,
please send an email of your planned contribution to [email protected] with the subject
“Getting started with open source development book feedback”
