Starting An Open Source Project
There are several ways in which work on an open source project can start:
- An individual who senses the need for a project announces the intent to develop the project in public. The individual may receive offers of help from others. The group may then proceed to work on the code.
- A developer working on a limited but working codebase, releases it to the public as the first version of an open-source program. The developer continues to work on improving it, and possibly is joined by other developers.
- The source code of a mature project is released to the public, after being developed as proprietary software or in-house software.
- A well-established open-source project can be forked by an interested outside party. Several developers can then start a new project, whose source code then diverges from the original.
Eric Raymond observed in his famous essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" that announcing the intent for a project is usually inferior to releasing a working project to the public.
It's a common mistake to start a project when contributing to an existing similar project would be more effective (NIH syndrome). To start a successful project it is very important to investigate what's already there.
Read more about this topic: Open Source Software Development
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