Book Image

Open Source Projects - Beyond Code

By : John Mertic
Book Image

Open Source Projects - Beyond Code

By: John Mertic

Overview of this book

Open source is ubiquitous in our society, with countless existing projects, and new ones emerging every day. It follows a "scratch-your-own-itch" model where contributors and maintainers drive the project forward. Through Open Source Projects - Beyond Code, you'll learn what it takes to develop a successful, scalable, and sustainable open source project. In this book, you’ll explore the full life cycle of open source projects, from inception, through launch, to maturity, and then discover how to sunset an open source project responsibly. Along the way, you’ll learn the concepts of licensing, governance, community building, ecosystem management, and growing maintainers and contributors, as well as understand how other open source projects have been successful or might have struggled in some areas. You can use this book as an end-to-end guide or reference material for the future. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to accelerate your career in open source. Your newly acquired skills will help you stay ahead of the curve even with the ever-evolving nature of technology.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Getting Ready to Go Open Source
7
Part 2: Running an Open Source Project
12
Part 3: Building and Scaling Open Source Ecosystems

Remedying toxic behavior

Toxic behavior can take several forms. It can be what is called flaming, which refers to individuals going back and forth attacking one another with those lower-brain responses we spoke about earlier in this chapter. It can also showcase itself with people disconnecting or becoming disengaged, or just people having short or trite responses in conversations. Both are highly disruptive, holding a community back and causing stress and friction.

Often, this comes down to communication issues, where there need to be collaborative and constructive conversations, like what Amy achieved in the examples previously in this chapter. Let’s look at another fictional example of such an exchange; here, we have Ray as the contributor and Sam as the maintainer:

Ray: I keep looking at this pull request to refactor some of the tests, and I’m not sure I understand it.

Sam: What’s not to understand? It’s simple tests.

Ray: Well, not all of...