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

Finding contributors and being a mentor

Identifying who among the current contributors will be a great future maintainer is the hardest part of getting new maintainers. In the early days of a project, or for a less experienced maintainer, everyone showing up looks like a possible maintainer. That’s not only overly optimistic but can also deter people from becoming a contributor. Remember that often contributors and end users come to a project with the “scratch-your-own item” mentality and doing work in a project for a maintainer likely isn’t that itch.

At the same time, as we will learn more about in Chapter 11, Open Source and the Talent Ecosystem, contributors may also have the motivation to gain development experience or even be part of the project leadership in time to open up their future employment opportunities. As a maintainer, know that you don’t have the responsibility of career development for a contributor looking to become a maintainer...