Show HN: OSwatch – A News Aggregation Site for Open-Source Software

But, I hope it does well and will keep an eye on it.

By no means trying to ruin your enthusiasm here, but please DO consider using one of the existing aggregators for the same purpose.

Also Open Source seems like a very broad topic to me, covering most of the programming languages, *nix systems and so on...

http://oss-watch.ac.uk

How will the site will filter for informational value? There are huge numbers of releases on a vast array of software most people won't care for following even if it is important, e.g. the Linux kernel, Hadoop, Spring.

The hard problem is determining what votes confirm. That is, what distinguishes a good submission from a bad submission is what makes a community. If it's just votes without standards then me and my friends and our sockpuppets can make it all about the LOL's.

Others have touched on the hard problem of community in regard to the name. From a community standpoint, there's no big tent uniting all open source communities any more than there's a big tent uniting all political communities.

There are three big approaches to contributions: copy left, any use allowed, and assign copyright to the project. [1] It's politics by any other name. Some people play the game hard. A few play it for keeps. And most people don't really care very much except when there's titillating gossip or a bare knuckled knife fight. And on the internet, my money would be on people tuning in for an unending stream of unreconciled battles royale.

The term "free and open source software" is a way institutions sluff off accusations of having taken a stance even though the institutions have -- for adamant copy leftists there's no disjunction between "free" and "open source" that requires the "and". As the institutional view has come to mainstream development, there's been an opportunity for institutions to collapse the terminology down to "open source" which is a property not a community. It's only cold calculation and good manners that keep technology CEO's from saying "Richard Stallman, who the fuck are you and who pays you?"

Catering to the open source community suffers from the problem that it's hard to capture a market segment and build a community around it. Rationalizing along the lines of "There are one billion people in China and all we need to do is charge each of them $1.00" is easier even though it doesn't work for any institution other than the government of China and even then not so much.

My advice:

+ Scale back the idea where it is clearer who might use it and what value those people will get from investing in building a community. More importantly, it needs to be clearer who might almost be the right fit but: fail to see the attraction, not abide by community standards, lurk, go off and clone it on a different topic.

+ Start with something clear and narrow and with some semblance of an existing community, e.g. projects under the Apache foundation. Even better if there is some buzz, e.g. Microsoft's open source efforts.

+ Building around enterprise is actually congruent with the idea of "open source". It also may be easier to impose higher standards of behavior than are typical of the internet.

Finally, I doubt that the look and feel of Hacker News is the secret sauce. I suspect that it's mostly what I don't see that makes it work.

This turned out to be more of an exercise than I expected. Imagine that.

Good luck.

[0]: To state the obvious.

[1]: I'm not not advocating one position over the other. I'm just coarsely modeling. Like all models it's wrong, but it may be useful.