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
Famous quotes containing the words starting, open, source and/or project:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Luxury, then is a way of
being ignorant, comfortably
An approach to the open market
of least information.”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)
“The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped
that ticked yesterday so well?”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“In 1869 he started his work for temperance instigated by three drunken men who came to his home with a paper signed by a saloonkeeper and his patrons on which was written “For God’s sake organize a temperance society.””
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)