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

What comes after sunsetting?

Post-sunsetting, the primary responsibility is to make it clear that the project is no longer maintained and ensure the project’s assets have a long-term home. Sometimes, we see projects come out of being sunsetted or parts of the code base being incorporated into future projects or used when legacy applications need to be ported to new platforms in the future. We’ll look at what a project should do in this section.

Mark code repositories and issue trackers as archived

Right after sunsetting a project, it’s crucial to clarify the project’s status. This involves archiving the project’s code and documentation in a public repository so that users and developers can still access it in the future. This can be especially important if the project significantly impacts the open source community.

Here are some best practices for marking code repositories when sunsetting an open source project:

  1. Add a notice to the...