Best is to develop in the open from the very first commit. If you've already got code in progress, then open it up now and keep working as you would have anywa

Best is to develop in the open from the very first commit. If you've already got code in progress, then open it up now and keep working as you would have anyway. In other words: "release as open source" != "declare version 1.0". Open sourcing your code is unrelated to publishing a release; you can do the latter any time you want, from your open source repository. The way to ask for eyeballs is to make an announcement about a release -- to say "this code is ready for you to try it out", which, again, is independent of whenever you might have open sourced the code prior to that announcement.