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

Governance and Hosting Models

If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.

- Winston S. Churchill

It’s always interesting to speak of governance alongside open source if we recall from Chapter 1, The Whats and Whys of Open Source, the ethos of open source coming from hacker communities that saw problems in the existing methods of producing and using software. You might call them a bit counter-culture, which is a characteristic that stuck with the free and open source software communities for several years of their existence.

But over time, you quickly realize that having models for getting things done is key to long-term success and sustainability. This has been part of our human history for centuries. The Code of Hammurabi in 1755 BC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi) focused on creating a standard set of laws and justice for the Babylonians. While mostly known for the principle of “an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth...