8 ms·

Open sourcing a Contracted project: I toggled the “public” switch, now what?

55 points by alonisser 10y ago

neurobuddha 10y ago
This article seems relevant for my situation. A few days ago I released project management software called Wheatbin: http://wheatbin.com http://wheatbin.com. It's my first contribution to Open Source. The github repo is here: https://github.com/wheatbin/wheatbin https://github.com/wheatbin/wheatbin The software works great for my needs, but it would be nice to see Wheatbin evolve through community involvement. I wasn't sure if that happened organically or if there were things I could do to get that started.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  There is no such thing as "if you build it, they will come". I mean, the movie "Field of Dreams" was about a literal miracle, after all. Open source software takes just as much marketing and "sales" to convince people to use--say nothing about contribute to it--as proprietary software.
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    > There is no such thing as "if you build it, they will come". Who is marketing Redis, Postgresql, UBlock, VLC? I understand the opposite doesn't apply to everything but neither does the blanket negation.
    - detaro 10y ago
      Attention for uBlock AFAICT started with a widely shared blog post comparing its performance to other Adblockers. From there on it's probably word of mouth, but writing that blog post and getting attention to it was "marketing", even if maybe not intended that way. And it was good marketing, since tech loves "This thing is proven to be sooo much faster than the old thing people don't love 100%" stories ;)
    - moron4hire 10y ago
      Postgres is very heavily marketed by EnterpriseDB.
      - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
        Your post explicitly states: > Open source software takes just as much marketing and "sales" to convince people to use--say nothing about contribute to it--as proprietary software. The comments in response to my post have been about the author's of said software publishing blogs - are you really equating 1 author publishing a blog with the 'marketing and sales' used to sell proprietary software (as in dedicated sales team, dedicated marketing teams, SEO, dedicated social media/pr employees)? > Postgres is very heavily marketed by EnterpriseDB. Saying that Postgres is 'very heavily marketed' when drawing a comparison to the marketing proprietary software receives isn't just misleading, it's false.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Their evangelists doing talks at developers's conferences.
    - sotojuan 10y ago
      VLC was (is?) written about extensively by blogs like Lifehacker. It's one of the most recommended programs on forums. I'm surr it started by the creators letting people know about it.
chvid 10y ago
Thanks for writing this. It lists many reasons why I don't open source my side projects. Open sourcing is meanigless without considerable additional work in form of quality assurance, documentation, project management, marketing. As a developer you should weight whether it is worth the cost for the return of exactly what? Getting your stuff out there? Developer street credits? Maybe a consulting gig down the road? Or is your time better spent doing other things?
- syoc 10y ago
  I don't see how open sourcing is meaningless if you don't do the things you listed. It may be meaningless to you, but you can never tell if someone else will be able to benefit from your work.
  - chvid 10y ago
    In theory yes. In practice no, your project will just be burried amongst the million other github projects.
    - cm3 10y ago
      But it's more useful to the ecosystem as an unmaintained code dump than being kept closed. If there's interest, someone will pick it up partially or fork it. In the worst unmaintained, unused case, it's still potentially valuable for code archiving/history purposes.
    - ultramancool 10y ago
      Not in my experience. I've pulled some very useful things out of tiny projects on GitHub, most recently a friend and I fixed several performance issues in a great voip.ms SMS client for android. Tiny, obscure project but it was just what we needed, after a few fixes for our use cases.
    - detaro 10y ago
      I've found quite a few interesting and useful things in inactive zero-star github repos. As long as title and description are useful for search and it is not something that is totally done to death your project might be surprisingly easy to find.
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
I just pushed an effort at Linode to open source our new manager website: https://github.com/Linode/manager https://github.com/Linode/manager I think it will avoid these pitfalls. It is a learning resource because I hope that someone will read it instead of spending the weeks we had to spend figuring out how to set up the ideal frontend web project in 2016. I also hope that it'll get some exposure among those millions of open source JavaScript projects by simply inheriting our customerbase. Unfortunately, though, I don't realistically see many external contributions coming into the manager. It hits all of the points that make it easy to contribute (it's not my first open source project by a wide margin), but I would be surprised to see many contributions despite that.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  > It hits all of the points that make it easy to contribute Where's the documentation? > Reporting Bugs > Don't. Hmm...
  - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
    Yeah, fair. It's still early in development so those resources haven't been made available.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Fair enough, I just wanted to point out documentation is pretty much the first and most important thing you need to do if you want someone to contribute to an open repository, so I don't think you can say it "hits all the points" without having any docs available.
      - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
        Well, I do see significant amounts of contributors working on several of my personal open source projects, and I only generally make end user docs available. A well organized codebase doesn't always need much explanation.
dankohn1 10y ago
Please take a look at the new Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge. https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/ https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/ It helps list what it takes to have a project that is usable by others and to which they can easily contribute.
- sshykes 10y ago
  Do you think it might have been responsible to disclose that you are a "Senior Advisor" to this coreinfrastructure initiative thing?
  - dankohn1 10y ago
    I guess I thought I did, since it's right there if you click on my username. Also, the badging project is completely free and open source (we're also eager for contributions about improving the criteria), so it's not like I'm aiming to rack up my affiliate commissions. But apologies if it came off as irresponsible.
wimagguc 10y ago
Open-sourcing side projects is fun only if you care about those or until they become more popular. One of the tiny libraries I developed some time ago has 1000+ stars as of today, and though I have no interest in developing it any further, I keep receiving bug reports, questions or pull requests. The questions tend to be on the silly side, most pull requests would break the code for others. Most of the time it's a pain really, yet, I have to keep it out there and make it available on Cocoapods too, mostly because the last thing I want is to break other dev's projects.
vigilant 10y ago
I fear that opening sourcing my personal projects would work against me. The code that i develop in my spare time is done for my own benefit, and just for fun - no documentations, no unit tests, and there are hacks there which i'm proud of. I fear a future employer would look at that code and think that is how I write code in professional environment.
- icebraining 10y ago
  You could create a repository under a nickname not directly tied to your "real" name. Having multiple virtual identifies is one of the best features of the 'net.

55 points by alonisser 10y ago

This article seems relevant for my situation. A few days ago I released project management software called Wheatbin: http://wheatbin.com http://wheatbin.com. It's my first contribution to Open Source. The github repo is here: https://github.com/wheatbin/wheatbin https://github.com/wheatbin/wheatbin The software works great for my needs, but it would be nice to see Wheatbin evolve through community involvement. I wasn't sure if that happened organically or if there were things I could do to get that started.

moron4hire 10y ago
There is no such thing as "if you build it, they will come". I mean, the movie "Field of Dreams" was about a literal miracle, after all. Open source software takes just as much marketing and "sales" to convince people to use--say nothing about contribute to it--as proprietary software.
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  > There is no such thing as "if you build it, they will come". Who is marketing Redis, Postgresql, UBlock, VLC? I understand the opposite doesn't apply to everything but neither does the blanket negation.
  - detaro 10y ago
    Attention for uBlock AFAICT started with a widely shared blog post comparing its performance to other Adblockers. From there on it's probably word of mouth, but writing that blog post and getting attention to it was "marketing", even if maybe not intended that way. And it was good marketing, since tech loves "This thing is proven to be sooo much faster than the old thing people don't love 100%" stories ;)
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    Postgres is very heavily marketed by EnterpriseDB.
    - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
      Your post explicitly states: > Open source software takes just as much marketing and "sales" to convince people to use--say nothing about contribute to it--as proprietary software. The comments in response to my post have been about the author's of said software publishing blogs - are you really equating 1 author publishing a blog with the 'marketing and sales' used to sell proprietary software (as in dedicated sales team, dedicated marketing teams, SEO, dedicated social media/pr employees)? > Postgres is very heavily marketed by EnterpriseDB. Saying that Postgres is 'very heavily marketed' when drawing a comparison to the marketing proprietary software receives isn't just misleading, it's false.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Their evangelists doing talks at developers's conferences.
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    VLC was (is?) written about extensively by blogs like Lifehacker. It's one of the most recommended programs on forums. I'm surr it started by the creators letting people know about it.

chvid 10y ago

Thanks for writing this. It lists many reasons why I don't open source my side projects. Open sourcing is meanigless without considerable additional work in form of quality assurance, documentation, project management, marketing. As a developer you should weight whether it is worth the cost for the return of exactly what? Getting your stuff out there? Developer street credits? Maybe a consulting gig down the road? Or is your time better spent doing other things?

syoc 10y ago
I don't see how open sourcing is meaningless if you don't do the things you listed. It may be meaningless to you, but you can never tell if someone else will be able to benefit from your work.
- chvid 10y ago
  In theory yes. In practice no, your project will just be burried amongst the million other github projects.
  - cm3 10y ago
    But it's more useful to the ecosystem as an unmaintained code dump than being kept closed. If there's interest, someone will pick it up partially or fork it. In the worst unmaintained, unused case, it's still potentially valuable for code archiving/history purposes.
  - ultramancool 10y ago
    Not in my experience. I've pulled some very useful things out of tiny projects on GitHub, most recently a friend and I fixed several performance issues in a great voip.ms SMS client for android. Tiny, obscure project but it was just what we needed, after a few fixes for our use cases.
  - detaro 10y ago
    I've found quite a few interesting and useful things in inactive zero-star github repos. As long as title and description are useful for search and it is not something that is totally done to death your project might be surprisingly easy to find.

Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago

I just pushed an effort at Linode to open source our new manager website: https://github.com/Linode/manager https://github.com/Linode/manager I think it will avoid these pitfalls. It is a learning resource because I hope that someone will read it instead of spending the weeks we had to spend figuring out how to set up the ideal frontend web project in 2016. I also hope that it'll get some exposure among those millions of open source JavaScript projects by simply inheriting our customerbase. Unfortunately, though, I don't realistically see many external contributions coming into the manager. It hits all of the points that make it easy to contribute (it's not my first open source project by a wide margin), but I would be surprised to see many contributions despite that.

StavrosK 10y ago
> It hits all of the points that make it easy to contribute Where's the documentation? > Reporting Bugs > Don't. Hmm...
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  Yeah, fair. It's still early in development so those resources haven't been made available.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Fair enough, I just wanted to point out documentation is pretty much the first and most important thing you need to do if you want someone to contribute to an open repository, so I don't think you can say it "hits all the points" without having any docs available.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
      Well, I do see significant amounts of contributors working on several of my personal open source projects, and I only generally make end user docs available. A well organized codebase doesn't always need much explanation.

dankohn1 10y ago

Please take a look at the new Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge. https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/ https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/ It helps list what it takes to have a project that is usable by others and to which they can easily contribute.

sshykes 10y ago
Do you think it might have been responsible to disclose that you are a "Senior Advisor" to this coreinfrastructure initiative thing?
- dankohn1 10y ago
  I guess I thought I did, since it's right there if you click on my username. Also, the badging project is completely free and open source (we're also eager for contributions about improving the criteria), so it's not like I'm aiming to rack up my affiliate commissions. But apologies if it came off as irresponsible.

wimagguc 10y ago

Open-sourcing side projects is fun only if you care about those or until they become more popular. One of the tiny libraries I developed some time ago has 1000+ stars as of today, and though I have no interest in developing it any further, I keep receiving bug reports, questions or pull requests. The questions tend to be on the silly side, most pull requests would break the code for others. Most of the time it's a pain really, yet, I have to keep it out there and make it available on Cocoapods too, mostly because the last thing I want is to break other dev's projects.

vigilant 10y ago

I fear that opening sourcing my personal projects would work against me. The code that i develop in my spare time is done for my own benefit, and just for fun - no documentations, no unit tests, and there are hacks there which i'm proud of. I fear a future employer would look at that code and think that is how I write code in professional environment.

icebraining 10y ago
You could create a repository under a nickname not directly tied to your "real" name. Having multiple virtual identifies is one of the best features of the 'net.