Producing Open Source Software

For those just finding this, the first edition was written in 2005 which was pre-git and Sourceforge was still the place for open source. That said, although the tools have changed, the concepts, team management, etc are fantastic resources and shaped much of my involvement in open source since. If you're working in this space - or even community management for a technical group - this should move to the top of your reading list.

Disclaimer: I own a printed copy of the first edition and backed the second on Kickstarter. He's been pretty light on updates - last one was mid December - so I hope things are still going well.

See also, the Kickstarter campaign to update it:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kfogel/updating-produci...

Having just skimmed through, this looks like a great resource.

One thing that doesn't seem to be mentioned in the Technical Infrastructure section is email hosting. How do OSS projects manage email accounts on the project domain? (I'm thinking of accounts like info@example.org and dave@example.org).

This seems especially important if you're going to have "project" accounts on services like Twitter, which will require an email address to set up.

Do they just pay up for hosting with multiple inboxes, or create aliases to a single inbox?

Update from the author:

The Kickstarter campaign was fully funded (thank you, all backers). Finishing the second edition has taken longer than I expected, partly due to the necessary changes being much more extensive than I at first realized. However, all the work is being done in the open, so you can see the in-progress changes at http://producingoss.com/vc.html .

This is a great book. I had the good fortune of working with Karl and a couple of the other Subversion founders (Fitz and Ben) early in the Chrome project at Google. This book served as an invaluable resource for the team to learn about open source development as we established the Chromium project.