Students worldwide, join the FrostWire peer to peer development community
Hello my name is Angel Leon and I’m the co-founder and lead developer of FrostWire.
FrostWire is an open source file sharing client and media player that was created initially as a fork of LimeWire once the freedom of information sharing on the peer to peer network was threatened.
Today I want to invite you to collaborate with our project and help us build the peer to peer technologies that will help decentralize the internet of today and tomorrow.
Here at FrostWire we believe it is a human right to have uncensored access to information and culture, and despite the negative stigmas associated with file sharing technologies we should always work to preserve open uncensorable channels to share information and culture.
Peer to peer information sharing protocols like BitTorrent enable us to do this, and we need help specially from young students with fresh new ideas on how to build the next generation file sharing technologies that will keep mankind connected and free to know the truth.
FrostWire as it is today consists of several different open source projects, frostwire-desktop: our client for Windows, Mac and Linux computers; frostwire-android: our android client, frostwire-jlibtorrent: our bittorrent libraries based on the awesome open source libtorrent project and frostwire-common a project with libraries shared among all the other projects.
We are looking for students or people eager to learn what it’s like to create real world massive use software in an Open Source community environment.
We are looking for people that care about our same ideals and the possible applications of p2p technologies to not just enable free uncensored information access for file sharing, publishing and communication, but also create technologies to level the playing fields on markets currently ruled and limited by media monopolies and archaic payment networks.
We need talented programmers with a passion for simple, clean, efficient code and design, eager to always put their best efforts into every contribution so that our code base has no “broken windows” at any time.
Students looking to learn object oriented programming to the fullest will find FrostWire a very fullfilling playground.
Know-how in peer to peer networking is a plus but it can be gained by collaborating with the project.
Experience in the areas of networking (TCP/UDP) will be of help but are not necessary to contribute as FrostWire is much more than just file transfering, it must deal with problems like search, file management, media playback and user experience.
The languages used in the project are mostly Java (most of the project is written in Java, specially the android version) and C/C++ (in case we need to go down and fix/extend libtorrent and mplayer). Knowing scripting languages such as Python/Ruby/Bash will help you build tools and tests and are a nice plus.
We need passionate graphic and user experience designers to help us better the way users interact with our different products, our user interfaces is constantly changing and we want to adapt the desktop version to new design trends and hardware devices (how will you use file sharing with augmented reality?)
We need translators in every language to help maintain the ever changing messages presented to users.
We need testers that can help us find and reproduce bugs before we ship new versions of the software, if you can code and maintain automated tests that will be a great way to get familiar with the code base.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED?
FrostWire is an open source project, this means you don’t need to ask permission to start fixing what bothers you, you just need to clone our repositories, and start working on issues that may bother you, or on any of the existing issues published on our bug tracker.
Each one of the projects is periodically funded with Bitcoins that come from the donations sent by our users, this way if one of your patches gets merged into the master branch you will immediatly receive 1% of what’s left on the fund, we try to keep funds so that these tips range from $5 to $20 (depending on the current Bitcoin price and fund availability)
Harder issues to solve also have bounties, they can be FrostWire gear, or anywhere from $25, $50, $100 or even more depending on the complexity of the problem to solve and the funds available at the time.
Join us, let’s make software that gets used by tens of millions of people, you will be surprised to find out what you’re able to do and how many people you can impact in a very short amount of time.
Community members who are proven to collaborate with true passion and talent, to the point that they’re trusted enough to have direct commit privileges on the project will be considered for partial or remote full time hiring.
FrostWire is a decentralized project in every aspect, our headquarters is the internet and everyone is free to work on it remotely from where it’s most convenient.
FROSTWIRE LAB PROJECTS:
There are many projects we’d like to get started but we can’t do it without you, if our existing projects don’t excite you perhaps the following list will:
– BitTorrent based web: Let’s create a web browser and web publishing tools that leverages the power of Bittorrent to let anybody publish uncensorable content online.
– BitTorrent + Bitcoin file transfers. Let’s implement a proof of concept inside FrostWire that allows anybody to sell content online without centralized entities. Let’s enable book authors, musicians, film makers and photographers to publish content on the network that is downloadable for Bitcoins, the author decides to share a percentage of every sale with honest seeders willing to help distribute the content. (See Bitcoin payment channels for escrow-less payments)
Official FrostWire Blog 