java is currently owned by oracle. the most commonly used c++ compiler (gcc) is open source, probably maintained mostly by the same guys who maintain linux/unix. python is open source, maintained mostly by guido and his followers.

just pick something and start working on it. back when i was first programming in vb6 some odd 6 years ago i found a development website for battle.net chat bots called bnetdev.net or something at the time (chriso's main site for miragechat) from there i would post code snippets others could use in their chat projects and such and eventually created my own chat project and released it open source for people to learn from.

tbh once you feel comfortable with your language you should look into reverse engineering and work with sockets. sockets are really the only reason i learned to program because everything i love is based around them. hell to keep it simple you can create a channel bot for irc or something. the IRC protocol is well documented and really simple. one of my side projects was a sloppy made IRC bot for diablo 2 that allowed users to report hot daiblo clone ips so others could catch them and get their annis.

also if you are wanting to learn asm i suggest the pdf book "programming from the ground up pdf" (type in google first link to the princton.edu website). it teaches the basics about at&t syntax assembly on the 32bit linux platform.

tbh start a github and just start coding random things. when im bored i like to code things like shop inventory documentors where you store a database of items in stock and stock numbers and such and create a interface to pull up items based on names and wildcards. could start a simple winsock program such as a simple 1 way chat client or maybe even a multi client chat server. (winsock is really not that hard.)

id just think of an idea of what people would use and start developing on it.

This post was edited by AbDuCt on Jan 28 2013 10:55am

sockets are used for creating network connections right? Or am I wrong

yes they are. basically they are just a file descriptor that connects to a file descriptor on another machine. its kind of like using fopen to get a file descriptor to a local file but instead its opening it on another machine. they way you handle the read/write to those descriptors is up to you meaning the possibilities are endless.

edit:: at least on linux. windows has winsock overhead bullshit you need to initiate before you can use sockets but they are 99% the same.

some random tutorial for winsock in c++ i found

http://www.win32developer.com/tutorial/winsock/winsock_tutorial_1.shtm

This post was edited by AbDuCt on Jan 28 2013 02:36pm