The key to success in Open Source lies in understanding that it's not just about software, it's about the people.
It’s very hard to make open source work for products. multiple problems:
How is it funded? could still make money from services, but makes it harder to integrate and sell. as a user, you should want this app to be around for the long run, and the best way to ensure that is to fund it directly.
Open source doesn’t guarantee long-term viability. it’s extremely common in OSS that maintainers burn out, things start breaking, and there is a lot of churn (until it dies).
While it’s true that development might go quicker, a lot of the time the overhead of managing the open source workflow negates the wins. And sometimes the problem just takes a while to think about, no amount of throwing devs at it will help (this is the case for what I’ve been doing in the past several months. Actual’s architecture for local data + syncing is unique and required careful thought). Open source works best for libraries in my experience. I think the best thing I could do is open-source parts of the apps as libraries, which would share the work and allow people to contribute back, while still allowing Actual itself to be carefully integrated.
Drive-by Haskell Contributions by Neil Mitchell - Great talk on how to start contributing to projects.
Code Shelter - Maintainer Community for Abandoned FOSS Projects.
IssueHunt - Reward project owners and developers who maintain important open-source software in the internet stack.
Gitcoin - Lets you get paid for working on open source software.
BOSS - Bounties for Open Source Software.
Contributor Covenant - Code of Conduct for Open Source Projects.
SourceSort - Find the perfect open source projects to contribute to.
TideLift - Commercial support and maintenance for the open source dependencies you use to build your applications, backed by the project maintainers.
Make a README - Because no one can read your mind.
CMTY - Community platform for open source projects.
Encode - Collaboratively funded software development.
No Code of Conduct - Code of Conduct for Adults in Open Source Software. (HN)
Sponsorware - Release strategy for open-source software that enables developers to be compensated for their open-source work with fewer downsides than traditional open-source funding models.
Spasibo - Simple command-line tool to supporting open-source frameworks.
TLDR Legal - Software Licenses in Plain English.
Open Sauced - Provides structured onboarding for new contributors to open source. (Code) (Web)
Libraries.io - Open Source Discovery Service. (Code)
Scarf - Helps open-source developers get paid and deliver better software.
Awesome Open Source - Find Open Source By Searching, Browsing and Combining 7,000 Topics.
Public Money, Public Code - Why is software created using taxpayers’ money not released as Free Software?
Open Source Directory - Human-browsable directory of popular open-source projects. (Code)
License Finder - Find licenses for your project's dependencies.
ROSS Index - Fastest-growing open-source startups, every quarter.
Parity Public License - Public LICENSE for software that requires users who build with your software to share their work with the community, too.
Journal of Open Source Software - Committed to publishing quality research software with zero article processing charges or subscription fees. (Code)
xs:code - Connecting Companies with Open Source Developers.
Bountysource - Funding platform for open-source software. (Code)
Tribute - Command-line tool to simplify the process of generating, checking and maintaining open source licenses in your projects.
WG Securing Critical Projects - Helping allocate resources to secure the critical open source projects we all depend on.
Open Source Stash - Privacy-focused, powerful, secure open-source alternatives. (HN)
Open Source Challenges - Resources to think about free software and open source current challenges.
Awesome Alternatives - List of mostly free and open source alternatives to proprietary software and services.