I was just worrying last night that I've released my side project too early, so glad to hear someone encouraging imperfect-but-usable releases. If anyone has advice on finding users, testers, and contributors besides posting on Show HN, please let me know.
Turning a side project into an open-source project
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Turning a side project into an open-source project
#12I think that adding a (permissive) license is the missing step from this "tutorial". If you want people to use your project you are going to need to give them permission to do so.
You have to have a license to attract contributors. https://choosealicense.com/ and github make it easy; there's zero excuse to not have a license.
Permissive licenses attract the broadest range of contributors, so if you're looking to build a large community, they are the way to go. GPL tends to have a smaller overall, but very strong pool of contributors, so if copyleft makes sense for your technology, by all means use it.
Just use a license, please.
Re: Turning a side project into an open-source project
#13I was just worrying last night that I've released my side project too early, so glad to hear someone encouraging imperfect-but-usable releases. If anyone has advice on finding users, testers, and contributors besides posting on Show HN, please let me know. https://github.com/spieglt/flyingcarpet
Wow, cool project!
You should try Reddit. It has a lot of niche communities where you could share your project.
Also Google for things someone who seeks for a project like yours would Google. That gives you a rough idea of what kind of sources people use to find tools like yours.
Also some directories list specific tools (like "awesome" lists of github). Try listing your project there. Or even starting your own "awesome" list project on GitHub :)
Re: Turning a side project into an open-source project
#14This is a great guide. I followed the similar steps for https://gitignore.io
I was doing a lot of development work and going to github.com/github/gitignore to copy templates from GitHub's website to my own file system was getting tedious. What I wanted was a simple command line tool like
gi java > .gitignore
Re: Turning a side project into an open-source project
#15I think that adding a (permissive) license is the missing step from this "tutorial". If you want people to use your project you are going to need to give them permission to do so.
Thumbs up on licensing. This is key to the success of a project in my opinion. If a project is missing a license, that's a clear sign that I can't use it. I've even filed issues on open source projects stating that I want to help them, but I can't due to unclear licensing.
Re: Turning a side project into an open-source project
#16I think that adding a (permissive) license is the missing step from this "tutorial". If you want people to use your project you are going to need to give them permission to do so.
Unless you don't mind a hostile take-over don't make it too permissive though. GPL is a good license if you want good protection while still allowing people to fork, share and profit on your work.
Re: Turning a side project into an open-source project
#17I think that adding a (permissive) license is the missing step from this "tutorial". If you want people to use your project you are going to need to give them permission to do so.
Thumbs up on licensing. This is key to the success of a project in my opinion. If a project is missing a license, that's a clear sign that I can't use it. I've even filed issues on open source projects stating that I want to help them, but I can't due to unclear licensing.
[deleted]
Re: Turning a side project into an open-source project
#18I think that adding a (permissive) license is the missing step from this "tutorial". If you want people to use your project you are going to need to give them permission to do so.
Only because so much FUD has been spread about the GPL
The GPL advocates say it is FUD, but as any BSD advocate will tell you the concerns are real. Note that GPL advocates spread FUD about the BSD license
In my experience the GPL advocates completely ignore the concerns of the BSD people. The BSD people understand the GPL concerns they either don't think they are very real world (they will acknowledge some exceptions when forced to); or more pragmatically think that the GPL: concerns are outweighed by other concerns.
You need to figure out where you stand. Calling the concerns of the other side FUD is in fact not helpful.
Re: Turning a side project into an open-source project
#19This is a great guide. I followed the similar steps for https://gitignore.io I was doing a lot of development work and going to github.com/github/gitignore to copy templates from GitHub's website to my own file system was getting tedious. What I wanted was a simple command line tool like gi java > .gitignore So I built it over the course of a week while at Mammoth CA. I was on a snowboard trip so I would ride during…
A little feedback - it seems a bit mixed up. If I put in "Node" it assumes I want suggestions for files that you'd typically ignore on a Node project. That's useful. But if I enter "Web" it gives me a list of web file types to ignore (*.html etc). Rather than assume I'm working on a web project (as it does for Node) it's doing the opposite of that, and making suggestions to ignore all the "Web" files.
Clearly this isn't a huge problem as your project is doing really well, but it jumped out at me a bit.
Re: Turning a side project into an open-source project
#20Nice work! I especially appreciated the emphasis on writing a good README… but I think it's missing the most crucial thing you need on top your README. That's the motivation aka why the project exists at all, why it's better than the alternatives, etc.
The differentiating qualities of the project is indeed very important. But I think it's more than okay to also say that "this is a clone of xxx I'm using to learn yyy".
Putting a bit more into the README has my preference. Often I come acros repos with “I cloned xxx with yyy”, where I have never heard of xxx. It only takes a bit more to briefly explain xxx.