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

Getting your project set up for newcomers

The first part of having a welcoming project is to give the appearance that maintainers want newcomers. That might sound flippant, but too often, it doesn’t appear that way. First impressions are everything in an open source project, and how your project is perceived is gauged by that first impression. Individuals and organizations use, participate, and invest in projects that they perceive to be run well.

Let’s kick things off by looking at the basics of the infrastructure.

Setting up your project infrastructure

When you first come to an open source project, you likely have several expectations.

First, you want to find the code itself. We see most projects these days leverage a service such as GitHub or GitLab, which offer free code hosting services to open source projects. Additionally, there’s the advantage of being close to other open source projects, which can help your project be more naturally discoverable...