How the FlightGear project works

As FlightGear is getting increasingly popular, we get to see new users coming to our forums and the mailing list every week. Many of them quite obviously very much interested in contributing to FlightGear in one way or another and getting involved in our community.

This is something that all of us appreciate, because this is important to keep the project alive and kicking, so we do truly appreciate and welcome new community members, because this is an important part of enabling FlightGear to grow even more popular.

There's such a huge range of ways to get involved in FlightGear, that we truly appreciate everbody's skills.

Please don't think that you cannot contribute to the project, because you cannot program or because you cannot design 3D models. Creating a flight simulator is a huge undertaking and there are many tasks which may seem less obvious to outsiders, such as helping maintain the wiki, moderating the forum, reporting spam, triaging the bug tracker, reviewing bug reports, helping fellow users and so on.

However, sometimes we get to see some irritations among new community members and more seasoned members, because people may have certain expectations and assumptions on contributing to FlightGear. This has frequently caused some heated discussions, sometimes even flame wars on both, the devel mailing list and the forums.

Apparently, this occurs frequently when dealing with people who already have experience developing software or contributing to open source software, be it professionally or as a hobby.

Over the last couple of years, such discussions have taken place increasingly and they are obviously eating up considerable resources, given that spare time is our most precious resource to contribute to the project.

It seems, some people are trying to apply their own experiences and assumptions to FlightGear as a software development project, because FlightGear seems so different from anything they may know already.

To tell the truth: Most of us have been in that situation at some point. To most of us, the way FlightGear works as a project has been somewhat irritating and confusing in the beginning. So, we may actually share your initial confusion, because most of us went through the same process at some point.

Honestly, you could search the forum and mailing list archives and probably find heated responses posted by even the most seasoned contributors. Some of us may have a track record of thousands of postings now, but this is just a result of having been part of the community for a number of years. Frequently, some of our very first posts were also voicing criticism.

So this is an attempt at explaining things in a non-heated fashion, so that we can point aspiring contributors to this article explaining some things which may not be directly obvious, but which we feel are important to understand why some things are done the way they are.

This is not to say that things are set in stone, but the current development model is the result of a certain evolution, and it's exactly this what has enabled FlightGear to survive and grow for over a decade already.

So, we would like to ask you to keep these factor in mind when proposing changes and when voicing recommendations, and when discussing such issues with fellow community members, publicly or privately.