Where to find code bases for starting software archeology?

Question

I am successfully working through some code katas, but I want to try another new learning technique for programming - software archeology. The problem is I don't know where to find a relatively small code base forthe start, which will contain well written code. Can you help?

Answer 1

I agree with "Dour High Arch"

However when I started this process ... I found that large code base quickly overwhelmed me ... here are some projects that I used

1. FLASH web server ... it is a minimal implementation of a research based flash server written in C
2. look at earlier version ... less than 1.0 of linux kernel to look at how it was developed to understand OS code
3. Java web application ... I used a java based forum application jForum
4. PHP ... osCommerce, phpBB
5. C++ ... notepad++

make sure that you have a good source code browser (I use sourceInsight)

and also make sure that your development environment is setup correctly and you can build , debug and run the software