This book was compiled during an Independent Study course at Rochester Institute of Technology, in conjunction with the MAGIC Center. In it, you will find a collection of information that explain how to get started in the free and open source community.

Daniel Jost and Colden Cullen have worked together on nearly every project throughout their years at RIT. After taking the Advanced FOSS course taught by Remy DeCausemaker, they decided to obtain the Free and Open Source Software & Free Culture minor in their final semester, and they will be the first two students to graduate with this qualification. This book fulfills a portion of the minor, and will act as a curriculum for future FOSS classes.

Daniel Jost has always been interested in how things work. Whether it was doing Public Relations for game mods like Conflict Earth 2142, modifying the stylesheets of various websites, or majoring in Game Design & Development at RIT, Daniel lives with the engineer's mantra to be curious. He has accepted a full-time position at Microsoft where he will be working with web technology.

Colden Cullen loves building stuff. He grew up having built practically every Star Wars Lego set created. As soon as he discovered code however, he was hooked. Now, he's relatively well known in the D language community, especially in the game development circles, and is the Lead Engine Programmer on Circular Studios' Dash Engine. Colden has accepted a full-time position at Amazon where he will be working in the Video Games division.

We would be happy to review any changes or additions you suggest. If you are new to Github and open source contributions, check out the section about hosting code on Github for an example on how to modify this book.

If you successfully submit a pull request, Travis CI should automatically update the web version the book after a few minutes.

mdBook requires Rust to be installed.

To install Rust, Download the installation file for Windows (x86-64bit) or use the following command for macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

To install mdBook:

cargo install mdbook

To clone and build the book:

cd HowToFOSS
mdbook build

This builds an HTML version of the book. You can also build other formats using mdbook-pdf, mdbook-epub, or other third party plugins for mdBook.

All guidance, best practices, and case-studies are under Free/Open Source Licenses. The content is formatted by mdBook.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.