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

Why would a company want to open source code?

Getting support for open sourcing code within an organization requires first understanding what the motivations are for even doing so. It requires you to think with a business mindset, which at the end of the day comes back to costs and revenue. Sometimes, this can be framed in more long-term thinking, but being persuasive when championing this kind of initiative also requires citing some short-term benefits. Let’s look at what tend to be the primary motivators.

Lowering development costs

The bottom line is something every company thinks about, and this tends to be a major motivation in looking at open source. In software development, there are costs both in terms of initial development and maintenance, which includes new functionality, as well as fixing bugs and resolving security issues. Staying on top of this can be quite an endeavor.

One aspect of the development costs that companies don’t often think about is...