Caos Linux is created by Infiscale and members of the open source community at large. If you find this distribution useful, there are many ways you can contribute. All of the following methods of contributing will earn you or your organization a spot in our distribution credits. Your work will also help us grow into an even better solution for you and the rest of the community.

Joining the Team

No matter your technical background, if you have the desire, you can be a great asset to the open source community in general as well as this project in particular. There are various roles and positions that can be filled by motivated people wanting to further the open source movement and help their peers. We are a friendly group of developers (unlike some other open source development camps) and are very interested in working with others of similar goals. So whether you are an experienced software developer, an RPM packager, or a user wanting to help out, please introduce yourself to us!

Developer

There are various aspects of the distribution that require new technologies. People that are familiar with C, Perl, Python, and shell are of significant value to our project.

Package Maintainer

Package maintainers watch the day-to-day development of the user-facing aspects of the operating system. Everything from graphical interfaces to services are controlled by package maintainers. As we grow in functionality and features, the role and quantity of package maintainers must scale proportionally to sustain quality.

Quality Assurance Tester

Q/A testing is of vital importance and is underutilized by many open source development efforts. The Q/A team will work with the OS developers and package maintainers to ensure that packages install and remove cleanly, behave properly, and perform well.

The ideal candidate would be a hobbyist that wants to run the latest and greatest packages. Specific knowledge of how to repair problems encountered during Q/A testing is beneficial, but not necessary; the act of observing and documenting issues or bugs is enough to get things moving in the right direction.

Open Source Evangelist

In the open source community, marketing is generally done by word of mouth and 3rd party publications. Don't underestimate the need for evangelism and vocal support for open source projects.

The Caos line of distributions has been around since 2003, so many people are familiar with it; however, there is still the need to gather further supporters and contributors. Join e-mail lists, local Linux user groups, and discussion forums; attend industry trade shows; and promote Caos Linux everywhere you can. We see this as very valuable, and taking on a role like this is greatly appreciated!

Professional Evangelist

We have deliberately made Caos an ideal solution for many industries. Among them are:

• Hosting providers (ISPs and cloud service providers)
• Hardware vendors (servers, HPCC, netbooks, and embedded solutions)
• Software vendors

Letting your vendor know about Caos, and requesting that they support us, is extremely important and will help us create an even better solution!

Hosting Our Infrastructure

We as an open source group can always use more systems and resources to host our infrastructure. Please let us know if you have a system that we can utilize for our needs.

Commercial Partners

If the time ever comes where you need to obtain services from a commercial organization for this product, only work with companies that contribute back to our community. We will provide a list of these commercial partners on our web site so they can be easily identified.

When engaging with commercial support organizations that are not listed, you should let them know that they are not on the certified vendor list and that they need to contact us. Or you can let us know about them, and we can follow up with them directly.

And if you are a commercial organization, make sure you contact us and become an Infiscale partner and certified service provider for Caos!

Monetary support

If you are able to provide financial support to the project, contact Infiscale to purchase entitlements. These entitlements will give you access to private mirrors and signed GPG keys for packages and updates. They are in no way required to use Caos. Caos is a 100% free, community-maintained project but purchasing support provides an important source of funding to ensure that the resources the community needs to keep the project thriving continue to be available.