Is there any tutorials that discuss developing opensource programs?

Topics I need to learn about are things like licensing info, what are makefiles and how to write them, how to compile the source when the user types in "make", and other aspects of opensource software that users expect to see when going to install an opensource program.

Thank you.

'info make', google for 'gpl'

What is 'info make'?

oh sorry, info is a command name. do you know what 'man' is? if not, open up a prompt and type 'man man' [enter], and then 'man info'. info is a program that browses texinfo formatted documents, in this case by typing 'info make' you would bring up a whole mini-book of information about how make works and how to use it etc.

Thanks. Ill try it out.

Here's a link to an online version of the book GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool:

http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/

It discusses the GNU autobuild tools a bit, as well as a brief overview of Makefiles.

I think Eric Raymond´s "Art of Unix Programming" is also a good option, it is freely available on the net.

Found it: http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/

It looks interesting. I think I'll take a look at. Thanks

mattp,

If you want to develop your own free software, the GNU site has a nice page describing
how to GPL your work ... (hmm. The page won't come up for me right now, but it's pretty
simple and worth a read.)

As far as using make, there's probably many good tutorials on the net,
but I went and picked up the O'reilly book "Managing Projects with make" by Oram and
Talbott. Good book.

Note: make is very easy to use for simple projects, but supposedly
gets harder for large projects (on the scale of, say, apache), which is why some larger
projects use jam or ant for build management.

Another ESR book to read (re. open source software) is "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

Check out the linuxquestions.org wiki for info too.

If you want to learn to collaborate with others on free software projects, you'll want to
learn CVS too (source code file version management software). Alternatives to CVS
are Subversion ("svn"), and GNU Arch (which I hear is very good).

Good luck!