Open Source
The key to success in open source lies in understanding that it's not just about software, it's about the people (great and clear communication with proper documentation).
Nice contributing pages
Notes
- It’s very hard to make open source work for products. multiple problems:
- 1.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.
- 2.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).
- 3.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.
Links
- Drive-by Haskell Contributions by Neil Mitchell - Great talk on how to start contributing to projects.
- IssueHunt - Reward project owners and developers who maintain important open-source software in the internet stack.
- TideLift - Commercial support and maintenance for the open source dependencies you use to build your applications, backed by the project maintainers.
- 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.
- Public Money, Public Code - Why is software created using taxpayers’ money not released as Free Software?
- 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)
- 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 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.
- Stakes.social - Dev Protocol’s user facing application where OSS projects and patrons connect. (Launch Article)
- Awesome Software Patreons - Curated list of awesome programmers and software projects you can support.
- InnerSource Patters Book - Use of open source principles and practices for software development within the confines of an organization.
Last modified 4d ago
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