It's probably not the best time (politically speaking) to try and pick up an H1-B job. The cheapskates ate employing L-1s and the more socially-sensitive employers are taking heat for the high level of unemployed domestic workers.
On the open-source topic, however:
Originally posted by Rishi Wright:
Does the open source project pay anything? or do we need pay to participate in such projects?
If you run into anyone demanding that you
pay to participate in an open-source project,
run away. Someone's trying to rip you off.
Open-source is not the same thing as working for free. Large chunks of Red Hat Linux code are open source (such as RPM, the Red Hat Package Manager), but they were developed by full-time Red Hat employees. RH simply chose to publish the code.
Most OS projects ARE done by people outside of their regular employment (if any), such as my own EJBWizard project. In some cases, such as the PostgreSQL DBMS and the
JBoss webapp server, the principals make a living off support of the package, but to do that you need a have complex system that a lot of people want to use.
If you like an open-source program and want to contribute, often you can do things that will get you to be invited to join the development team. Or, you can do like I did and come up with your own system and publish it on freshmeat and/or sourceforge or some similar place where potential users can find you.
Speaking of getting invited to join the team, my EJBWizard isn't a really major project, so I never bothered to set it up for team development. Mostly I consider suggestions and look for ways to implement them or take code sinppets people send me and merge them. There was one exception, however. A fellow by the name of John Ueltzhoeffer was using it to develop code for a WebLogic system and was an especially valuable contributor.
I'm located in Florida, and my correspondents are world-wide, with suggestions coming in from Germany, India, France and Russia, among other places. Unfortunately, John worked on the 98th floor of the World Trade Center.