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

Assessing and remedying low areas of growth

Before we dig into this more, I want to tell all maintainers that it’s perfectly normal to have areas where growth doesn’t hit the targets you are aiming for. Every open source project is a bit different, with different people, priorities, target audiences, industries, and paces of development, and it will tend to be discouraging if you look at your open source project in the same light as something like Node.js or Ruby. Setting goals and metrics is an iterative process, and it is important to re-assess as time progresses to ensure you have the right goals and/or metrics.

Fixing growth issues is quite unique to each specific growth metric. Let’s look at a few metrics that I’ve commonly seen as ones that projects might struggle with and look at some strategies to fix them.

Commits/committers

Projects will often set a metric around the number of commits or committers in a project, which takes various forms...