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

Roles in an open source project

As I’ve said repeatedly in this book, every open source project is different. That being said, we generally see a few different classifications of roles in an open source project. Let’s take a look at them now, starting with the user.

Users

Everyone in an open source project starts by using the project. It’s the starting point of the scratch-your-own-itch model of open source; if a project is useful to you, you become invested in it.

As an aside, something we will dig more into in Chapter 6, Making Your Project Feel Welcoming, and to some extent in Chapter 7, Growing Contributors to Maintainers, is why keeping a focus on how users can use the project is so important. It’s also important to recognize that not every user will be a contributor, and that’s okay. However, with lots of users comes not only a higher likelihood of contributors but also a social aspect, which shows potential contributors the value and...