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

Being where the conversation is

Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.

Carl Sandburg

Open source communities are not something you can completely design. Indeed, you can provide infrastructure, support, and guidance, as we’ve spoken about in this chapter, but the magic of them is when they take on a life of their own. When I was a community manager at SugarCRM, I remember always being amazed and delighted at the interesting extensions that the community members built and the motivations behind them. Linus Torvalds did an interview a few years back, and when asked about what was surprising about Linux development, he said the following:

What I find interesting is code that I thought was stable continually gets improved. There are things we haven’t touched for many years, then someone comes along and improves them or makes bug reports in something I thought no one used. We have new hardware, new...