
Ask HN: When and how should I release my open source tool? - flaque
I&#x27;m very new to the open source world, but I built a command line tool for myself that I think other people could use too. I&#x27;m in the process of building a few new features that I think would be helpful to people (and to myself). Should I hold off on telling people about it until I finish those features? Or should I market it and then see which features people want? How do I find out what makes a tool &quot;good&quot; for other people?<p>Also, what&#x27;s the correct way to tell people about a tool like this?
======
RubenSandwich
I think you should release it now. It's often times hard for open source tools
to gain attention as they don't have the same marketing that tools from
companies have, but you've just hit the front page of HN. So I think you
should capitalize on this opportunity and release it if you think it is in a
useable state as this websites attention span is in 6 hour increments at best.

~~~
flaque
Okay! In response to what "toomuchtodo" mentioned, I posted it as a "Shown
HN:"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13546486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13546486)

Hopefully someone finds it useful!

~~~
nemild
Just upvoted.

------
kingname
I have an open source project called MarkdownPicPicker, which is used to
upload img to web host and generate markdown format URL. I released it at its
version of 0.1 and will cost a lot of time to set up the environment before
use it.

But there are some people tell me that it is useful and they can not live
without it.

Also, they suggested me of new features and develop it with me.

Now, MarkdownPicPicker is in its version of 1.0 and it is so easy to use it as
soon as you download it both in macOS and windows.

I tell this story because I want to tell you that you should release it now
and develop it according to other people's advice.

P.S. You can see MarkdownPicPicker at
[https://github.com/kingname/MarkdownPicPicker](https://github.com/kingname/MarkdownPicPicker)

------
toomuchtodo
Release it now!

> Also, what's the correct way to tell people about a tool like this?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submit](https://news.ycombinator.com/submit)

Preface title with "Show HN: "

Might also share it on an appropriate Reddit subreddit.

------
lowmagnet
I have two open source projects, one is 4 years old, and the other is about a
year old.

I pushed them out to github as soon as they were useful. I waited to put a
license until I was sure I would be able to support them and they were feature
complete enough.

------
huddo121
Release it straight away.

Don't worry about the code looking dirty, embryonic code always does. If it's
a big enough tool it may warrant setting up a GitHub Pages site for it, just
to make it a bit easier to find when somebody is suffering from the same
problems you were.

In terms of new features, once you've put the repo on GitHub (or wherever)
other people will likely suggest features as issues or modify the program
themselves (and hopefully open a PR).

~~~
flaque
Okay, I made a github pages site for it:
[https://flaque.github.io/thaum/](https://flaque.github.io/thaum/)

Is using `wget` or `curl` the correct way to distribute the binary?

~~~
caleblloyd
curl should be fine, might I suggest changing your instructions from:

curl
"[https://github.com/Flaque/thaum/releases/download/v0.2.0-bet...](https://github.com/Flaque/thaum/releases/download/v0.2.0-beta/thaum")
-o "/usr/local/bin/thaum"

to use sudo and chmod because root owns `/usr/local/bin` by default:

sudo curl
"[https://github.com/Flaque/thaum/releases/download/v0.2.0-bet...](https://github.com/Flaque/thaum/releases/download/v0.2.0-beta/thaum")
-o "/usr/local/bin/thaum" && sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/thaum

~~~
flaque
I was worried about asking people to use sudo, but I think you're right. I'll
do that. Thanks!

------
ArturT
When I released my first ruby gem for rspec test suite parallelisation I
decided to write a short blog post about it. If you don't have your own blog
you can write the post on your company blog. Thanks to that you will get some
promotion because your company or colleagues can tweet or share it on
Facebook.

Another thing I did was to post my article on Reddit in the ruby group. This
seems to be a validated way of getting some traction. Make sure your friend
read the blog post before publishing so you can iterate after feedback to make
it interesting for people who will first time hear about your tool. :)

Oh, and here is my blog post: [http://blog.lunarlogic.io/2014/parallel-your-
specs-and-dont-...](http://blog.lunarlogic.io/2014/parallel-your-specs-and-
dont-waste-time/)

------
kfogel
Best is to develop in the open from the very first commit. If you've already
got code in progress, then open it up now and keep working as you would have
anyway. In other words: "release as open source" != "declare version 1.0".
Open sourcing your code is unrelated to publishing a release; you can do the
latter any time you want, from your open source repository. The way to ask for
eyeballs is to make an announcement about a release -- to say "this code is
ready for you to try it out", which, again, is independent of whenever you
might have open sourced the code prior to that announcement.

------
teddyh
[http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Release-Practice-
HOWTO/](http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Release-Practice-HOWTO/)

------
db48x
Release early, release often.

