
Producing Open Source Software - StreakyCobra
http://producingoss.com/
======
StreakyCobra
This has already been posted on HN more than one and half years ago [1] and
the first edition get back to 2005. It contains updates up to early 2016 as
mentioned in a few paragraphs. This book is a classical and a must go for
anyone wanting to start building a strong open-source community. It covers a
wide range of topics:

\- Getting Started (Name, Mission, Documentation, Hosting, Code of Conduct, …)

\- Technical Infrastructure (Web site, Mailing list, Version Control, Bug
tracker, IRC, Wiki, …)

\- Social and Political Infrastructure (Benevolent dictator, Consensus-based
Democracy, …)

\- Participating as a Business (Contracting, Funding, Marketing, Organization,
…)

\- Communications (Common pitfalls, Difficult people, Handling growth, …)

\- Packaging, Releasing (Versioning, Branching, Releasing, Testing, …)

\- Managing Participants (Community, Transitions, Committers, Credits, …)

\- Legal Matters (Licenses, Contributors, Trademarks, Patents, …)

(This list is a subset of the Table of Contents)

It covers nearly every topic that an open-source community can be concerned
about, and each section contains valuable thoughts for communities starting to
wonder about a given problematic.

I read the first edition eight years ago, and I'm planning to give it another
go because I realized that I've forgotten a lot of what I read. Another good
excuse to read it again is that the world and tooling has also evolved quite a
lot in 8 years (Github was launched 8 years ago!).

Happy reading!

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9323653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9323653)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Wow, no wonder so few attempt to start projects (or succeed). That's a lot of
chaff to get through, just to write some cool code.

~~~
StreakyCobra
Projects should not try to start that big directly. Remember the Linux Kernel
first announce: «I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be
big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.». It takes a lot of
year to arrive to the project it is now. Another example is Spacemacs, now
with close to 10'000 stars on github. It took 2 years of contributions from
the author before any external contribution has been made
([https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/graphs/contributors)).

But anyway it's priceless to have in mind the big pictures and all steps
needed to build a strong community for an open-source project right from the
beginning :-)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Not so sure. The vast majority of open-source projects have 1 or 2
contributors. Probably not necessary to prepare for widespread adoption and
fame for most of us.

~~~
StreakyCobra
Indeed, so it's probably just be my own curiosity that leads me to find this
priceless.

