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

Summary

This chapter scratched the surface of dealing with conflict, recognizing that it is good to have as long as it’s constructive. Projects I’ve worked on that had conflicts coming from vendors who were competitors tended to actually have a higher velocity of code and innovation than those that didn't. The same is true for projects with more diversity from different backgrounds, nationalities, races, genders, sexual orientations, and so on. That seems a bit counterintuitive at first, but if you think about it, having people in the room who all have the same experiences produces relatively predictable results. But when there are differences, we see a variety of perspectives and needs flourish, and that diversity brings new ideas and novel solutions. But when the conflict turns toxic, it becomes a distraction to a project and takes a lot of work and time to fix.

Handling conflict well is a centerpiece to being able to grow and scale as a project. Let’...