Get Involved!


How to take part

There are many different ways to get involved with ReactOS. Immense human resources went into the effort that brought forth the NT family of operating systems, including Windows XP and 2003. As ReactOS aspires to be a replacement for Windows, the same amount of resources would ensure the rapid progress of the project. This is where you can play a part.

Using ReactOS

You might just be interested in the OS itself and the possibilities it offers, in which case you might want to download and try ReactOS.

Testing ReactOS

No operating system is usable if it is found to be unstable and prone to problems. As ReactOS development work involves studying the behavior of an operating system that is not completely understood, testing should be of even greater importance, in order to fulfill the objective of binary compatibility with Windows.
You can assist the ReactOS development effort by installing regular trunk builds available here and providing feedback on issues/problems you encountered during and after installing the OS, including problems with applications, via our Bugzilla. More information with regard to debugging is available in this Wiki article, and is recommended reading for those who wish to submit a bug report.
Keep in mind that many applications do not work (correctly) because many API calls simply haven't been implemented yet, and thus cannot be marked as a bug per se.

Developing ReactOS

It's very simple to get involved with the development of ReactOS. The development team members are not part of some exclusive club with strict policies, so getting your code into the ReactOS codebase is straightforward. The only prerequisite is that you have not had access to Microsoft source code for the area you would be interested in working on. This includes any route in which you may have been exposed, whether it be via some student program or through illegally downloading leaked MS source code. Having viewed the source deems you as being tainted, and as such you may hinder the legality of the source which the ReactOS teams enforces every effort to keep clean.
If like most developers, the above doesn't apply to you, consider yourself clean and eligible to write code for ReactOS.
The best way to get involved is to start by installing an SVN client and downloading the source code. Next, download and install RosBE, the build environment used to facilitate the ReactOS build process. Once you've got this far you can either play around on your own to become familiar with the code base, or for the more eager you can skip that part and jump right into contacting the devs.
Contacting the devs can be done in two ways. The best and most responsive way is to join the ReactOS IRC channel on FreeNode. This is a very popular channel where there are sure to be a selection of active members, testers or developers to help with your initial questions. Those without clients can resort to finding one which can operate from within a web browser. In the event that you don't have IRC access, a special email address has been setup to answer your queries. This email address is dev_interest_addr where a ReactOS developer will answer your queries and help to get you started.
Getting commit access to the main repository is a relatively clear process. Simply supply patches for your area of interest via our Bugzilla service and the SVN patch generator. Your patches will be reviewed and added to the main source if found to be acceptable. After such a time (several patches) wherein the developers are happy with your quality of code, you will be offered commit access to the tree. This access may be by way of a branch if required, or it may be direct access to the tree.

Writers

A freely accessible codebase is of little educational value if nobody is able to comprehend it. To this end, the ReactOS Wiki contains user, developer and administrator documentation, as well as knowledge base articles. Well written documentation is essential to everyone that participates in the project and uses ReactOS, to allow people to understand the codebase and to use, evaluate and improve ReactOS effectively.
However, as it is, the Wiki would need more articles of useful quality. As the developers are occupied with the development effort in general, we need writers to create and maintain the articles in the wiki, covering all aspects of ReactOS from usage HOWTOs and tutorials to development notes. The wiki is editable to all users registered at the ReactOS website and all writers are encouraged to contribute articles there.
The documentation should be easy to follow and understandable to the layman where appropriate, such as in articles targeted at the user. Please use formatting consistent with the rest of the wiki. Localized articles should go under their respective namespaces.
The material posted on the Wiki should be the authors' own work and NO copyrighted works must be used without prior notice of having done so.

Infrastructure

A well-run project depends on there being solid and usable infrastructure: website, mailing lists, bug tracking system, documentation systems and others. Those people with server administration and web development skills in areas such as PHP or MySQL could assist here.

Finance

Financial contributions (donations) would be gratefully accepted, and would go towards stuff like hosting expenses, reimbursements for travelling to attend conventions and hardware to run our build bots, which produce our regular trunk builds. You could either make general donations or contribute towards Community Funded Ideas, the latter of which pays specific developers towards the implementation of major features of ReactOS. In this case, simply write for what idea you want your donation to be used for.
If you prefer to have some tangible return on the money you part with, you can support the developers through their various enterprises. In particular, those who are contemplating running common Windows applications from Linux could consider Bordeaux, an add-on to WINE, maintained by Steven Edwards, one of our developers.

Publicity

Even if a software project achieves considerable success, it is worth little to society if nobody knows about it. ReactOS aims to be a free alternative to Windows, and should hence be made known to those who use Windows as their operating system, as well as those who may wish to join our cause.
One method of helping us extend our reach to the community would be to suggest to your favorite technology publication or blog to review ReactOS.
Another way of getting publicity would be through letting the computing department of your local university or company know about ReactOS. This could possibly involve attempting to implement a small part of the operating system for your academic project, or informing the company IT department of using ReactOS as a possible means to save on Windows desktop licenses.

Other

Those who have skills outside of those already mentioned can still help out. Contributions from digital designers would be helpful as well, to provide graphics for the ReactOS GUI, website, and published material, amongst other things. Translators are always welcomed, and are invited to read the following article here for submitting contributions.
There are many other things you can do for ReactOS: subscribing to the mailing lists and giving feedback on various issues and creating localized sites about ReactOS are examples. For instance, this article was written by somebody who is not a regular contributor, but gives whatever time he can to the project.
If you have an idea that may help the project in any way, or would like some specific guidance as to what can be done, feel free to drop by our IRC channel. We hope to hear from you soon!

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