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Author Topic: Starting an open source software project  (Read 5565 times)

40hz

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Starting an open source software project
« on: January 16, 2013, 07:37 AM »
Excellent Smashing Magazine article by Nick Zakas and Nicole Sullivan - creators of CSS Lint - on what's involved in starting and running a real FOSS project.

At Velocity 2011, Nicole Sullivan and I introduced CSS Lint, the first code-quality tool for CSS. We had spent the previous two weeks coding like crazy, trying to create an application that was both useful for end users and easy to modify. Neither of us had any experience launching an open-source project like this, and we learned a lot through the process.

After some initial missteps, the project finally hit a groove, and it now regularly get compliments from people using and contributing to CSS Lint. It’s actually not that hard to create a successful open-source project when you stop to think about your goals.

These days, it seems that anybody who writes a piece of code ends up pushing it to GitHub with an open-source license and says, “I’ve open-sourced it.” Creating an open-source project isn’t just about making your code freely available to others.

The article has some good discussion of several open licenses and what they mean from a developer and project perspective. A must read for anybody not already familiar with how these things actually work.

Read the full article here.

Additional links:
CSS Lint website
CSS Lint on GitHub
« Last Edit: January 16, 2013, 08:03 AM by 40hz »

kyrathaba

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Re: Starting an open source software project
« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2013, 11:57 AM »
Thanks 40. Marked the full article to be read soon...

mouser

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Re: Starting an open source software project
« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2013, 12:21 PM »
Thanks for this. :up: