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

Open Source License and IP Management

One of my favorite slides regarding open source license and IP management comes from my colleague Mike Dolan of the Linux Foundation:

Figure 3.1 – Comparing good and poor IP management using illustrations in garage organization

Figure 3.1 – Comparing good and poor IP management using illustrations in garage organization

I like this slide not only because of the stark contrast but also the focus it places on the importance of the details. The floor colors carry over to the stripe on the wall. The gas pump hose has space to bend around in a nearly perfect circle. The toolboxes all match. Even someone who might not notice that level of detail would certainly recognize the garage on the right as more appealing than the chaos on the left.

A good software developer will obsess about similar details in their code, such as indentations, spacing inside of statements, positioning of brackets, comments, and variable naming. Here, it’s not a case of obsession, but it’s because they view putting...