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

Finding talent through open source

We talked earlier in this chapter about how software development and technology jobs, in general, have become more specialized in many cases as the breadth of technology grows. Add this to the fact that technology jobs are shifting more and more to remote opportunities (meaning employees working from home rather than within a traditional office). This has made it tremendously difficult to find talent to fill the roles companies have, as well as to retain that talent. We’ll talk more about the retention part in the next section, but first, let’s look at ways that employers can leverage the open source communities they work with to find talent to fill open roles.

Participating in communities

The easiest way to find talent in open source communities is…show up in the communities. Isn’t it obvious? Well, not always. As we talked about in Chapter 6, Making Your Project Feel Welcoming, sometimes these open source communities...