Ask HN: How does open source work?
If I think of a piece of software that there is a need for and I valuable to some group, do I simply start a project on GitHub and it will magically be built?
Does open source ever work that way?
Does open source ever work that way?
Almost never. You need core contributors with an understanding of your problem-space if you want software to start materializing in a git repo.
In the rare few scenarios where people do make software like that, it's arranged by a formal group that sponsors contributors. If you don't have a strong central base of developers, it's incredibly difficult to review or coordinate the changes you want.
However, you might get somewhere writing a small proof-of-concept for your idea. If enough people like what you're doing, you might attract like-minded developers who are willing to help you out. Very little gets done without direct contribution, though.
Maybe people add to it, maybe they don't. I liked the discipline of deploying to the Maven Central Repository this project I did to learn
Yeah, no, that won’t happen and isn’t at all how open source works.
There are two types of open source projects, small ones, and large ones.
Small ones have one, or maybe a few core contributors. These people do the bulk of the work and open the code up for a variety of reasons but often these are passion projects. The contributors work in their spare time, and generally the project has no or very little funding.
Then there are large open source projects, these typically have a foundation behind them. The foundation usually has big corporate donors and will have full-time paid contributors.
They don’t. I don’t know a single dev that is sitting around just waiting for someone else to give them an idea that they can start working on for no payment whatsoever.
Open source is driven by developers, they have idea, they put in the work and they open the code.
Developers aren’t itching to start open source projects. Developers are skilled laborers, and generally don’t have much desire to work for free. If a dev is going to work for free it generally is going to be, again, a passion project and maybe they can convince a few close dev friends to join them.
If it isn’t a passion project, then it’s generally not unpaid. Large open source projects have foundations, or large corporations that have paid employees contribute. For example Google open sourced the Go programming language. The devs that started that collected a pay check from Google while they were working on it.
If you have an idea for something, you will have to learn to code and do it yourself, you can open it up and hope to get some interest from the open source community. Or you can pony up and pay someone to develop it.