How to Run an Open Source Project

How to Run an Open Source Project by Sebastiaan Deckers

Who am I?
Founder of Pandion instant messenger
XMPP client for Windows
Open source, soon GPL v3
2-4 million users
Working at Directi on Chat.pw
Based on Pandion
Open source, GPL v3
Launching soon!

Goals of this Talk
Starting a project
Useful tools
Mistakes to avoid
Division of labour
Gaining and handling users
???
Profit!

Getting Started
Choose a name
Remember Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox?
Choose something that is available, easy to remember, pronounceable over the phone, …
Acronyms are good, recursion better
eg: GNU = Gnu’s Not Unix
Choose a logo
Humans remember visually

Code and Content License
Source Code
Copyleft: GPL, LGPL
Copyright: BSD, MIT/X11, Apache
Content
Logos, documentation, artwork, presentations, media, mailing lists, blog posts, …
Creative Commons Licenses
GNU Free Documentation License
Contributions
Transfer IP or scattered ownership

Project Hosting
Do-It-Yourself (DIY)
Pro: Product demo, commercial projects
Con: Productivity drain, attack/spam vector
All-In-One
Pro: No hassle, integrated suite
Con: No flexibility, poor usability
Loosely Coupled Mashup
Pro: No hassle, specialised
Con: Content islands

Releases and PR
Synchronised Releases
Major releases follow fixed cycle with others
Minor releases when needed by users
Nightly builds for developers and testers
PR 2.0
Wikipedia
Blog
Twitter
Ohloh
Community!

Team Management Melting pot of experience and development styles Distributed location & time zone Co-developers fix bugs and improve architecture Code quality Specialist contributors, resilient manpower Easy come, easy go High motivation and passion Ad-hoc productivity Actual Strength Perceived Weakness

Team Management
Lessons learned
Document everything, publically log decisions
Lower barriers to join the project or it gets forked
Decentralised decisions
Core leadership team
Listen to your users
Follow up, track progress, deadlines
Have a project manager who cracks the whip
If you build it, they will come
Don’t wait for people to join. Just go for it.

User Community
Problem:
The better the product, the more users.
The more users, the less time spent improving the product.
Solutions:
Self Service: documentation, wiki, discussion groups, chat rooms, etc.
Empowerment: Expert users assist novice users.
Filter and rank feedback so developers can concentrate on what matters.

Is there Money in Free Software?
Ways to monetise projects as a developer:
Sell related service or product
Advertising
Get better job offers
Consulting & paid support
Beg for donations

Project Foundations
Single entity owns the project
Why?
Fixed representation of ever changing team
Survival assurance to users
Accountability
Legal protection
Hiring employees
Receiving income

EOF Questions? Contact Me [email_address] http://twitter.com/pandion http://blog.pandion.be/ Shameless Plugs http://www.pandion.be/ http://www.directi.com/ http://start.pw/ Thank you for your time!

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How to Run an Open Source Project

by Sebastiaan Deckers on Aug 04, 2008

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