I was going to write a post today about how to get started contributing to the piglit project, but since it's Friday I though I'd have some fun instead and what's more fun than a good old fashion web poll.

For those that don't know I have run two crowd funding campaigns recently to help improve OpenGL support in Linux. One of my original goals has always been to encourage other developers who wouldn't normally have the time to contribute to get involved in open source by funding their work in a similar way.

So today's poll question is: What Open Source projects would you be interested in backing?

To get things started I have suggested four projects that I think are of high interest to Linux users and have even provided a little bit of information on where a developer could start in looking into the project further. I also encourage you to use the 'Other' functionality of the poll to let us know of other projects you would be interested in backing, also feel free to use the comments section at the bottom of the page to leave further information.

1. LibreOffice Printing Comments

This is *Number 1* of the TopTen for Enhancement Requests on the DocumentFoundation Wiki.

The importance of LibreOffice to Linux was highlighted recently with the City of Munich describing the switching of Windows users from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice as an important step in its transition of its desktops from Windows to Linux.

This feature is of particular concern due to comments like this “May I reiterate here that this enhancement is really an important one. Colleagues of mine just recently were deterred from this missing feature. As a workaround, they first created screen shots of every single page of the document and printed them including comments. And then, they reverted back to Office 2010. Sad.”

There is a mock up design referenced in the bug: https://bugassistant.libreoffice.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36815 and even an existing bounty on freedomsponsors.org

I took a bit of a look at this bug a while back. The implementation of comments looks to be in: http://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/sw/source/ui/docvw/PostItMgr.cxx

Comments are called PostIt internally, so if you want to look into this issue I would search for that:

http://opengrok.libreoffice.org/search?q=postit&project=core

A file called printdata.cxx also has some PostIt-Variables:

http://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/sw/source/core/view/printdata.cxx

2. Gimp OpenCL Support

In order to be a real alternative to Photoshop Gimp needs speed as we as features.

See the Gimp wiki page for information on how to get involved: http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Hacking:Porting_filters_to_GEGL

3. Firefox Wayland support

Firefox to Wayland bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

Looking at the blocker bugs to the Firefox bug to add Wayland support it looks like performance concerns seem to be holding back some of the work to switching to using Cario over Xrender.

See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=738937

Aside from that looks like there has already been a bit of work done towards replacing GLX with EGL see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788319

So basically things are moving slowly but there seems to be no real push to get Firefox working on Wayland.

4. More Mesa improvements

If you haven't already see my campaigns for why to is important: Improve the OpenGL support in Linux.

And if you want to get involved yourself see my blog post How to contribute to Mesa3d.

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