2.1. First, Look Around

Before starting an open source project, there is one important caveat:

Always look around to see if there's an existing project that does what you want. The chances are pretty good that whatever problem you want solved now, someone else wanted solved before you. If they did solve it, and released their code under a free license, then there's no reason for you to reinvent the wheel today. There are exceptions, of course: if you want to start a project as an educational experience, pre-existing code won't help; or maybe the project you have in mind is so specialized that you know there is zero chance anyone else has done it. But generally, there's no point in not looking, and the payoff can be huge. If the usual Internet search engines don't turn up anything, try searching on http://freshmeat.net/ (an open source project news site, about which more will be said later), on http://www.sourceforge.net/, and in the Free Software Foundation's directory of free software at http://directory.fsf.org/.

Even if you don't find exactly what you were looking for, you might find something so close that it makes more sense to join that project and add functionality than to start from scratch yourself.