Letter, If Not the Spirit, of One Or the Other Definition

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Letter, If Not the Spirit, of One Or the Other Definition Producing Open Source Software How to Run a Successful Free Software Project Karl Fogel Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Karl Fogel Copyright © 2005-2021 Karl Fogel, under the CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike (4.0) license. Version: 2.3214 Home site: https://producingoss.com/ Dedication This book is dedicated to two dear friends without whom it would not have been possible: Karen Under- hill and Jim Blandy. i Table of Contents Preface ............................................................................................................................. vi Why Write This Book? ............................................................................................... vi Who Should Read This Book? ..................................................................................... vi Sources ................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... viii For the first edition (2005) ................................................................................ viii For the second edition (2021) .............................................................................. ix Disclaimer .............................................................................................................. xiii 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 History ...................................................................................................................... 3 The Rise of Proprietary Software and Free Software ................................................. 4 "Free" Versus "Open Source" ............................................................................... 7 The Situation Today .................................................................................................... 9 2. Getting Started .............................................................................................................. 11 Starting From What You Have .................................................................................... 12 Choose a Good Name ........................................................................................ 13 Have a Clear Mission Statement .......................................................................... 15 State That the Project is Free .............................................................................. 15 Features and Requirements List ........................................................................... 16 Development Status ........................................................................................... 16 Downloads ....................................................................................................... 17 Version Control and Bug Tracker Access .............................................................. 18 Communications Channels .................................................................................. 19 Developer Guidelines ......................................................................................... 19 Documentation .................................................................................................. 20 Demos, Screenshots, Videos, and Example Output .................................................. 23 Hosting ............................................................................................................ 23 Choosing a License and Applying It ............................................................................. 24 The "Do Anything" Licenses ............................................................................... 25 The GPL ......................................................................................................... 25 How to Apply a License to Your Software ............................................................ 25 Setting the Tone ....................................................................................................... 26 Avoid Private Discussions .................................................................................. 27 Nip Rudeness in the Bud .................................................................................... 28 Practice Conspicuous Code Review ...................................................................... 29 Be Open From Day One .................................................................................... 31 Opening a Formerly Closed Project .............................................................................. 33 Announcing .............................................................................................................. 34 3. Technical Infrastructure .................................................................................................. 37 What a Project Needs ................................................................................................ 38 Web Site ................................................................................................................. 39 Canned Hosting ................................................................................................ 40 Message Forums / Mailing Lists .................................................................................. 43 Choosing the Right Forum Management Software .................................................. 44 Version Control ........................................................................................................ 53 Version Control Vocabulary ................................................................................ 53 Choosing a Version Control System ..................................................................... 57 Using the Version Control System ....................................................................... 57 Receiving and Reviewing Contributions ................................................................ 61 Bug Tracker ............................................................................................................. 63 Interaction with Email ........................................................................................ 65 ii Producing Open Source Software Pre-Filtering the Bug Tracker .............................................................................. 65 IRC / Real-Time Chat Systems .................................................................................... 67 IRC Bots ......................................................................................................... 68 Archiving IRC .................................................................................................. 69 Wikis ...................................................................................................................... 69 Wikis and Spam ............................................................................................... 70 Choosing a Wiki ............................................................................................... 70 Q&A Forums ........................................................................................................... 71 Translation Infrastructure ............................................................................................ 72 Social Networking Services ........................................................................................ 72 4. Social and Political Infrastructure ..................................................................................... 73 Forkability ............................................................................................................... 73 Benevolent Dictators .................................................................................................. 74 Who Can Be a Good Benevolent Dictator? ............................................................ 74 Consensus-based Democracy ....................................................................................... 75 Version Control Means You Can Relax ................................................................ 76 When Consensus Cannot Be Reached, Vote ........................................................... 76 When To Vote .................................................................................................. 77 Who Votes? ..................................................................................................... 78 Polls Versus Votes ............................................................................................ 79 Vetoes ............................................................................................................. 79 Writing It All Down .................................................................................................. 80 Joining or Creating a Non-Profit Organization ................................................................ 81 5. Organizations and Money: .............................................................................................. 83 The Economics of Open Source .................................................................................. 83 Types of Corporate Involvement .................................................................................. 84 Governments and Open Source ...................................................................................
Recommended publications
  • The Sad State of Web Development Random Thoughts on Web Development
    The Sad State of Web Development Random thoughts on web development Going to shit 2015 is when web development went to shit. Web development used to be nice. You could fire up a text editor and start creating JS and CSS files. You can absolutely still do this. That has not changed. So yes, everything I’m about to say can be invalidated by saying that. The web (specifically the Javascript/Node community) has created some of the most complicated, convoluted, over engineered tools ever conceived. Node.js/NPM At times, I think where web development is at this point is some cruel joke played on us by Ryan Dahl. You see, to get into why web development is so terrible, you have to start at Node. By definition I was a magpie developer, so undoubtedly I used Node, just as everyone should. At universities they should make every developer write an app with Node.js, deploy it to production, then try to update the dependencies 3 months later. The only downside is we would have zero new developers coming out of computer science programs. You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever designed and put it on the server. Combine that with all the magpies that were using Ruby at the time, and you have the perfect fucking storm. Lets take everything that was great in Ruby and re write it in Javascript, I think was the official motto. Most of the smart magpies have moved on to Go at this point, but the people who have stayed in the Node community have undoubtedly created the most over engineered eco system that has ever appeared.
    [Show full text]
  • 16 Inspiring Women Engineers to Watch
    Hackbright Academy Hackbright Academy is the leading software engineering school for women founded in San Francisco in 2012. The academy graduates more female engineers than UC Berkeley and Stanford each year. https://hackbrightacademy.com 16 Inspiring Women Engineers To Watch Women's engineering school Hackbright Academy is excited to share some updates from graduates of the software engineering fellowship. Check out what these 16 women are doing now at their companies - and what languages, frameworks, databases and other technologies these engineers use on the job! Software Engineer, Aclima Tiffany Williams is a software engineer at Aclima, where she builds software tools to ingest, process and manage city-scale environmental data sets enabled by Aclima’s sensor networks. Follow her on Twitter at @twilliamsphd. Technologies: Python, SQL, Cassandra, MariaDB, Docker, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Software Engineer, Eventbrite 1 / 16 Hackbright Academy Hackbright Academy is the leading software engineering school for women founded in San Francisco in 2012. The academy graduates more female engineers than UC Berkeley and Stanford each year. https://hackbrightacademy.com Maggie Shine works on backend and frontend application development to make buying a ticket on Eventbrite a great experience. In 2014, she helped build a WiFi-enabled basal body temperature fertility tracking device at a hardware hackathon. Follow her on Twitter at @magksh. Technologies: Python, Django, Celery, MySQL, Redis, Backbone, Marionette, React, Sass User Experience Engineer, GoDaddy 2 / 16 Hackbright Academy Hackbright Academy is the leading software engineering school for women founded in San Francisco in 2012. The academy graduates more female engineers than UC Berkeley and Stanford each year.
    [Show full text]
  • Freebsd-And-Git.Pdf
    FreeBSD and Git Ed Maste - FreeBSD Vendor Summit 2018 Purpose ● History and Context - ensure we’re starting from the same reference ● Identify next steps for more effective use / integration with Git / GitHub ● Understand what needs to be resolved for any future decision on Git as the primary repository Version control history ● CVS ○ 1993-2012 ● Subversion ○ src/ May 31 2008, r179447 ○ doc/www May 19, 2012 r38821 ○ ports July 14, 2012 r300894 ● Perforce ○ 2001-2018 ● Hg Mirror ● Git Mirror ○ 2011- Subversion Repositories svnsync repo svn Subversion & Git Repositories today svn2git git push svnsync git svn repo svn git github Repositories Today fork repo / Freebsd Downstream svn github github Repositories Today fork repo / Freebsd Downstream svn github github “Git is not a Version Control System” phk@ missive, reproduced at https://blog.feld.me/posts/2018/01/git-is-not-revision-control/ Subversion vs. Git: Myths and Facts https://svnvsgit.com/ “Git has a number of advantages in the popularity race, none of which are really to do with the technology” https://chapmanworld.com/2018/08/25/why-im-now-using-both-git-and-subversion-for-one-project/ 10 things I hate about Git https://stevebennett.me/2012/02/24/10-things-i-hate-about-git Git popularity Nobody uses Subversion anymore False. A myth. Despite all the marketing buzz related to Git, such notable open source projects as FreeBSD and LLVM continue to use Subversion as the main version control system. About 47% of other open source projects use Subversion too (while only 38% are on Git). (2016) https://svnvsgit.com/ Git popularity (2018) Git UI/UX Yes, it’s a mess.
    [Show full text]
  • Defect Tracking System Project Documentation
    Defect Tracking System Project Documentation Tottering Barr azotise some Faust and gyps his surplices so sweetly! Northrup remains impellent after Sigfried havers nominally or fluorescing any good-byes. Remus orientalize thunderously? So much like automation and project defect tracking documentation but not win any kind of the organization tries to track the list by the beginning development team and let an. The amount of tracking system project defect tracking system! All comments are moderated before publication and desire meet our guidelines. Testing is a lousy part of mature software life cycle, and recent trends in software engineering evidence the importance all this activity all survey the development process. Diving deeper into program language theory is a great way data grow outside a developer. Your comment has been received. Bug reporting by the Web and email. Her homeland of interests are Wireless Networks and Database Management Systems. As projects grow in size and complexity, the limits of an Excel story for tracking issues begin to show which quickly. Thank who for using our services. Ten reports engine is a few lines of system project defect tracking documentation appears every single pane contains the. Defect tracking is responsible system authority is applied for any system software so run system performs well. User interface and learning curve the system user interfaces are more user friendly than others. Switch to fullscreen mode always show business bug attributes at once. Some custom structure for large body usually, evaluating and tracking system project defect documentation related documents, planning with your development organization efficiently and eliminate bad.
    [Show full text]
  • Common Tools for Team Collaboration Problem: Working with a Team (Especially Remotely) Can Be Difficult
    Common Tools for Team Collaboration Problem: Working with a team (especially remotely) can be difficult. ▹ Team members might have a different idea for the project ▹ Two or more team members could end up doing the same work ▹ Or a few team members have nothing to do Solutions: A combination of few tools. ▹ Communication channels ▹ Wikis ▹ Task manager ▹ Version Control ■ We’ll be going in depth with this one! Important! The tools are only as good as your team uses them. Make sure all of your team members agree on what tools to use, and train them thoroughly! Communication Channels Purpose: Communication channels provide a way to have team members remotely communicate with one another. Ideally, the channel will attempt to emulate, as closely as possible, what communication would be like if all of your team members were in the same office. Wait, why not email? ▹ No voice support ■ Text alone is not a sufficient form of communication ▹ Too slow, no obvious support for notifications ▹ Lack of flexibility in grouping people Tools: ▹ Discord ■ discordapp.com ▹ Slack ■ slack.com ▹ Riot.im ■ about.riot.im Discord: Originally used for voice-chat for gaming, Discord provides: ▹ Voice & video conferencing ▹ Text communication, separated by channels ▹ File-sharing ▹ Private communications ▹ A mobile, web, and desktop app Slack: A business-oriented text communication that also supports: ▹ Everything Discord does, plus... ▹ Threaded conversations Riot.im: A self-hosted, open-source alternative to Slack Wikis Purpose: Professionally used as a collaborative game design document, a wiki is a synchronized documentation tool that retains a thorough history of changes that occured on each page.
    [Show full text]
  • Tuto Documentation Release 0.1.0
    Tuto Documentation Release 0.1.0 DevOps people 2020-05-09 09H16 CONTENTS 1 Documentation news 3 1.1 Documentation news 2020........................................3 1.1.1 New features of sphinx.ext.autodoc (typing) in sphinx 2.4.0 (2020-02-09)..........3 1.1.2 Hypermodern Python Chapter 5: Documentation (2020-01-29) by https://twitter.com/cjolowicz/..................................3 1.2 Documentation news 2018........................................4 1.2.1 Pratical sphinx (2018-05-12, pycon2018)...........................4 1.2.2 Markdown Descriptions on PyPI (2018-03-16)........................4 1.2.3 Bringing interactive examples to MDN.............................5 1.3 Documentation news 2017........................................5 1.3.1 Autodoc-style extraction into Sphinx for your JS project...................5 1.4 Documentation news 2016........................................5 1.4.1 La documentation linux utilise sphinx.............................5 2 Documentation Advices 7 2.1 You are what you document (Monday, May 5, 2014)..........................8 2.2 Rédaction technique...........................................8 2.2.1 Libérez vos informations de leurs silos.............................8 2.2.2 Intégrer la documentation aux processus de développement..................8 2.3 13 Things People Hate about Your Open Source Docs.........................9 2.4 Beautiful docs.............................................. 10 2.5 Designing Great API Docs (11 Jan 2012)................................ 10 2.6 Docness.................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Open Source Ethos Guiding Beliefs Or Ideals That Characterize a Community
    Open Source Ethos guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community Patrick Masson Open Source Initiative [email protected] What is the mission of the conference? …bring smart and creative people together; …inspire and motivate them to create new and amazing things; …with an intimate group of like minded individuals. What is the mission of the conference? …bring smart and creative people together; …inspire and motivate them to create new and amazing things; …with an intimate group of like minded individuals. This is the open source ethos – guiding beliefs, ideals of a community It's a great time to be working with open source 1.5 Million Projects 78% of companies run on open source 64% of companies participate It's a great time to be working with open source 88% expect contributions to grow 66% consider before proprietary <3% Don't use OSS 2015 Future of Open Source Survey Black Duck, Northbridge It's a great time to be working with open source It's a great time to be working with open source It's a great time to be working with open source It's a great time to be working with open source Open-course/Open-source Marc Wathieu CC-BY-NC-SA https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcwathieu/2412755417/ _____ College first Massive Open source Online Course (MOOC) Are you seeing other examples of this Mini-MOOC trend (free, I began but did not finish my first The Gates grantees aren’t the only ones open source courses by a MOOC (Massive Open-Source, startup or organization)? Online Course).
    [Show full text]
  • Katalog Elektronskih Knjiga
    KATALOG ELEKTRONSKIH KNJIGA Br Autor Naziv Godina ISBN Str. Porijeklo izdavanja 1 Peter Kent Pay Per Click Search 2006 0-471-74594-3 130 Kupovina Engine Marketing for Dummies 2 Terry Large Access 1 2007 Internet Freeware 3 Kevin Smith Excel Lassons & Tutorials 2004 Internet Freeware 4 Terry Michael Photografy Tutorials 2006 Internet Freeware Janine Peterson Phil Pivnick 5 Jake Ludington Converting Vinyl LPs 2003 Internet Freeware to CD 6 Allen Wyatt Cleaning Windows XP 2004 0-7645-7311-X Poklon for Dummies 7 Peter Kent Sarch Engine Optimization 2006 0-4717-5441-2 Kupovina for Dummies 8 Terry Large Access 2 2007 Internet Freeware 9 Dirk Dupon How to write, create, 2005 Internet Freeware promote and sell E-books on the Internet 10 Chayden Bates eBook Marketing 2000 Internet Freeware Explained 11 Kevin Sinclair How To Choose A 1999 Internet Freeware Homebased Bussines 12 Bob McElwain 101 Newbie-Frendly Tips 2001 Internet Freeware 13 Windows Basics 2004 Poklon 14 Michael Abrash Zen of Graphic 2005 Poklon Programming, 2. izdanje 15 13 Hot Internet 2000 Internet Freeware Moneymaking Methods 16 K. Williams The Complete HTML 1998 Poklon Teacher 17 C. Darwin On the Origin of Species Internet Freeware 2/175 Br Autor Naziv Godina ISBN Str. Porijeklo izdavanja 18 C. Darwin The Variation of Animals Internet Freeware 19 Bruce Eckel Thinking in C++, Vol 1 2000 Internet Freeware 20 Bruce Eckel Thinking in C++, Vol 2 2000 Internet Freeware 21 James Parton Captains of Industry 1890 399 Internet Freeware 22 Bruno R. Preiss Data Structures and 1998 Internet
    [Show full text]
  • CROP: Linking Code Reviews to Source Code Changes
    CROP: Linking Code Reviews to Source Code Changes Matheus Paixao Jens Krinke University College London University College London London, United Kingdom London, United Kingdom [email protected] [email protected] Donggyun Han Mark Harman University College London Facebook and University College London London, United Kingdom London, United Kingdom [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT both industrial and open source software development communities. Code review has been widely adopted by both industrial and open For example, large organisations such as Google and Facebook use source software development communities. Research in code re- code review systems on a daily basis [5, 9]. view is highly dependant on real-world data, and although existing In addition to its increasing popularity among practitioners, researchers have attempted to provide code review datasets, there code review has also drawn the attention of software engineering is still no dataset that links code reviews with complete versions of researchers. There have been empirical studies on the effect of code the system’s code base mainly because reviewed versions are not review on many aspects of software engineering, including software kept in the system’s version control repository. Thus, we present quality [11, 12], review automation [2], and automated reviewer CROP, the Code Review Open Platform, the first curated code recommendation [20]. Recently, other research areas in software review repository that links review data with isolated complete engineering have leveraged the data generated during code review versions (snapshots) of the source code at the time of review. CROP to expand previously limited datasets and to perform empirical currently provides data for 8 software systems, 48,975 reviews and studies.
    [Show full text]
  • Producing Open Source Software How to Run a Successful Free Software Project
    Producing Open Source Software How to Run a Successful Free Software Project Karl Fogel Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Karl Fogel Copyright © 2005-2018 Karl Fogel, under the CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike (4.0) license. Version: 2.3098 Home site: http://producingoss.com/ Dedication This book is dedicated to two dear friends without whom it would not have been possible: Karen Under- hill and Jim Blandy. i Table of Contents Preface ............................................................................................................................. vi Why Write This Book? ............................................................................................... vi Who Should Read This Book? .................................................................................... vii Sources ................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................... viii For the first edition (2005) ................................................................................ viii For the second edition (2017) ............................................................................... x Disclaimer .............................................................................................................. xiii 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • CSE Student Newsletter
    CSE Student Newsletter August 26, 2021 – Volume 11, Issue 18 Computer Science and Engineering University of South Florida Tampa, Florida http://www.cse.usf.edu Dear CSE Students: Welcome to the first newsletter of the Fall 2021 semester. Message from the UG Advisor: Add/drop week ends on 8/27. Schedules need to be final by 5:00PM on August 27. Students are responsible for the tuition and fees for any classes they are registered for after add/drop, even if they drop them later. August 27- TUITION PAYMENTS DUE to avoid late fees and cancellation of registration for non-payment. Tuition waiver forms are due to me for students appointed as TA/RA. September 20 - Deadline to apply for graduation in OASIS and send me your paperwork. October 8 - Tuition payments due for graduate assistants with tuition waivers, students with billed Florida prepaid tuition plans or with financial aid deferments to avoid $100 late payment fee. Please see the attached emails for more information. Message from the Grad Program Assistant: Add/drop week ends on 8/27. Schedules need to be final by 5:00PM on August 27. Students are responsible for the tuition and fees for any classes they are registered for after add/drop, even if they drop them later. August 27- TUITION PAYMENTS DUE to avoid late fees and cancellation of registration for non-payment. Tuition waiver forms are due to me for students appointed as TA/RA. September 20 - Deadline to apply for graduation in OASIS and send me your paperwork. October 8 - Tuition payments due for graduate assistants with tuition waivers, students with billed Florida prepaid tuition plans or with financial aid deferments to avoid $100 late payment fee.
    [Show full text]
  • The Opendaylight Open Source Project
    UNIVERSIDAD REY JUAN CARLOS Master´ Universitario en Software Libre Curso Academico´ 2014/2015 Proyecto Fin de Master´ The OpenDaylight Open Source Project Autor: Sergio Najib Arroutbi Braojos Tutor: Dr. Gregorio Robles 2 Agradecimientos A mi familia y a mi pareja, por su apoyo incondicional Al equipo de Libresoft de la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, por su afan´ en ensenar˜ el que´ y el porque´ del Software Libre Dedicatoria Para todos aquellos´ que hacen posible el fenomeno´ del Software Libre 4 (C) 2014 Sergio Najib Arroutbi Braojos. Some rights reserved. This document is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, available in http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Source files for this document are available at http://github.com/sarroutbi/MFP/opendaylight/ 6 Contents 1 Introduction 19 1.1 Terminology.................................... 19 1.1.1 Open Source Programmable Networking................ 19 1.2 About this document............................... 20 1.2.1 Document structure............................ 20 1.2.2 Scope................................... 21 1.2.3 Methodology............................... 21 2 Goals and Objectives 23 2.1 General Objectives................................ 23 2.2 Subobjectives................................... 23 2.2.1 Acquire competence on OpenDaylight project.............. 23 2.2.2 Analyze OpenDaylight project from an Open Source perspective.... 24 2.2.3 Statistics and measures of the OpenDaylight project.......... 24 3 OpenDaylight: A first view 25 3.1 OpenDaylight Project............................... 25 3.2 SDN........................................ 29 3.2.1 What is SDN?.............................. 29 3.2.2 SDN: Market share and expectations................... 31 3.3 NFV........................................ 34 3.3.1 What is NFV?.............................. 35 3.3.2 SDN/NFV relationship.......................... 36 3.3.3 NFV benefits..............................
    [Show full text]