31–40 of 51 posts
I feel a little apprehensive about sharing my code online, Im not sure if its an ego thing or from seeing some of the rude comments people have made over twitter about X pull request being made on github. Am I just being silly about this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you don't mind what is your project? just curious
One of them is a security-camera system for Raspberry Pis, the other is me just messing around writing an artificial-lifeform type thing in Python. Nether are ready for any kind of public exposure just yet ;) hackernews will be the 1st to know about it when I do though! Cheers
Let me know if you have some advice.
Does a few weekend projects on GitHub and blogging about it really count as "developing open source software"? Isn't this more like using the Open Source term to promote oneself? Compared to guys like Igor Sysoev churning away year after year working on nginx and _not_ using time to blog about it.
It's nice to hear about such success stories. Unfortunately most OSS projects never gain such a user base to be able to make a living off of it. I'm currently evaluating changing the license of our GPL-ed software to use something more restrictive or even dropping OSS and make it freeware only without providing sources. Read these emails if you want to know why: http://www.mail-archive.com/nxlog-ce-users@lists.source…
I think your biggest problem isn't your licensing but the documentation and the site itself. Since I work in the same space for a commercial product similar to Splunk, I'd like to offer a few comments.
1. It needs to be clear what the difference is between the enterprise and the open source version. Features and support must be clear with the enterprise version.
2. The message has to be clear for the target audience. Your product is very developer focused, but you have many support use cases. Focus on making it easy for non technical (non dev) people to get started monitoring the most popular pieces of infrastructure. A few getting started or how to guides for popular web servers and databases is a good start.
3. You may also need to cripple the functionality of your product (for the free version). Perhaps cripple it based on scale. The number of agents that can be deployed in an env can be restricted. Don't do what splunk do a disable based on data volume.
4. There are no images on your site. I can't visualize how I would instrument my infrastructure for log collection. This is vital.
I haven't used nxlog but this was my first impression. I hope the comments help in some way.
I contribute to some FOSS projects with hundreds of thousands of downloads and it's healthy from several points of view. On the one hand, I made some great "online" friends and feel great as I write code that I know people will use and appreciate. On the other hand, I've learnt so much and I know that some of the skills I've acquired during these years will help me when I'm old enough to get a job and start "actually…
but seriously, open source certainly helped make me the person i am, as well. by working on open source projects, i got my first gig (in a field i'm not professionally trained in, either), and i have been fortunate to have been surrounded by generous, bright people who i have always tried to learn from.
my own story is why i recommend to people to get involved in open source projects in their learning.
One warning to the author: he might be more careful about posting his rate for specific customers. I am also contracting at Google and my contract says that remuneration is confidential.
It's nice to hear about such success stories. Unfortunately most OSS projects never gain such a user base to be able to make a living off of it. I'm currently evaluating changing the license of our GPL-ed software to use something more restrictive or even dropping OSS and make it freeware only without providing sources. Read these emails if you want to know why: http://www.mail-archive.com/nxlog-ce-users@lists.source…
The author to a copyrighted work are not obligated by the choice of license. GPL and other copyright licenses give people other than the copyright holder a licence to do things that they don't have under regular copyright law. The copyright holder however has full rights regardless of license.
The only exception is false advertisement laws, but those are quite narrow in definition, and might not matter much for non-paying customers. A paying customer would have a case however.
Good article. If you looking for an idea for your next article I would love to know how you publish your open source code, how you introduce your projects to the first developers? any interesting hack there? or simple post in HN is enough?
I'm the author of the original article. I actually haven't posted it on HN and it was a pleasant surprise. I believe the best way to "promote" yourself is by being active in your community. Connect with other developers, discuss on forums, groups, g+, etc... Just logging in to push your open source project is pretty useless and quite lame. You have to be believable and you need to gain the trust of your community fir…
The only thing I can think of is to make packages for various distributions and see if they want to include it. But I'd like to get a bit more testing and feedback first, with maybe a couple dozen users before going mainstream.