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Producing Open Source Software

producingoss.com

3 pointsStreakyCobra5 comments

This has already been posted on HN more than one and half years ago [1] and the first edition get back to 2005. It contains updates up to early 2016 as mentioned in a few paragraphs. This book is a classical and a must go for anyone wanting to start building a strong open-source community. It covers a wide range of topics:

- Getting Started (Name, Mission, Documentation, Hosting, Code of Conduct, …)

- Technical Infrastructure (Web site, Mailing list, Version Control, Bug tracker, IRC, Wiki, …)

- Social and Political Infrastructure (Benevolent dictator, Consensus-based Democracy, …)

- Participating as a Business (Contracting, Funding, Marketing, Organization, …)

- Communications (Common pitfalls, Difficult people, Handling growth, …)

- Packaging, Releasing (Versioning, Branching, Releasing, Testing, …)

- Managing Participants (Community, Transitions, Committers, Credits, …)

- Legal Matters (Licenses, Contributors, Trademarks, Patents, …)

(This list is a subset of the Table of Contents)

It covers nearly every topic that an open-source community can be concerned about, and each section contains valuable thoughts for communities starting to wonder about a given problematic.

I read the first edition eight years ago, and I'm planning to give it another go because I realized that I've forgotten a lot of what I read. Another good excuse to read it again is that the world and tooling has also evolved quite a lot in 8 years (Github was launched 8 years ago!).

Happy reading!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9323653

Wow, no wonder so few attempt to start projects (or succeed). That's a lot of chaff to get through, just to write some cool code.

Projects should not try to start that big directly. Remember the Linux Kernel first announce: «I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.». It takes a lot of year to arrive to the project it is now. Another example is Spacemacs, now with close to 10'000 stars on github. It took 2 years of contributions from the author before any external contribution has been made (https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/graphs/contributors).

But anyway it's priceless to have in mind the big pictures and all steps needed to build a strong community for an open-source project right from the beginning :-)

Not so sure. The vast majority of open-source projects have 1 or 2 contributors. Probably not necessary to prepare for widespread adoption and fame for most of us.

Indeed, so it's probably just be my own curiosity that leads me to find this priceless.

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