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

When is a contributor ready to be a maintainer?

Mentorship can be a slow path. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself or the contributor too much, as it will become frustrating to you both. On the other end, if the contributor isn’t getting involved in the maintainer group much, they will become disinterested and drift away. Mentorship done well is an intentional process, with both the contributor and the maintainer setting clear goals and timelines to ensure the expectations are clear while having good communication to know how things are going and address concerns early on.

Sensing the moment at which a contributor is ready to become a maintainer tends to be more of an “art” rather than a “science.” There are some signals to look for to best gauge how things are going – let’s look at some of them now.

Signs that mentorship is going well

Each mentorship and project is a bit different, but you can generally look for a few...