Open Source Projects – Beyond Code

Accelerate your career and make an impact by launching and running a successful open source project.

Key Features

• Understand the method and rationale for launching an open source project
• Explore best practices and insights for running an open source project
• Leverage open source projects to advance your career

Book Description

Open source is ubiquitous in our society, with countless existing projects, and new ones emerging every day. It follows a “scratch-your-own-itch” model where contributors and maintainers drive the project forward. Through Open Source Projects – Beyond Code, you’ll learn what it takes to develop a successful, scalable, and sustainable open source project. In this book, you’ll explore the full life cycle of open source projects, from inception, through launch, to maturity, and then discover how to sunset an open source project responsibly. Along the way, you’ll learn the concepts of licensing, governance, community building, ecosystem management, and growing maintainers and contributors, as well as understand how other open source projects have been successful or might have struggled in some areas. You can use this book as an end-to-end guide or reference material for the future. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to accelerate your career in open source. Your newly acquired skills will help you stay ahead of the curve even with the ever-evolving nature of technology.

What you will learn

• Explore what is open source and how you can use it to accelerate your career
• Start an open source project while exploring its key considerations
• Grow, support, and manage a vast community of developers and users
• Build and maintain a mature and sustainable project
• Enable mass users and developers to downstream productization and outreach
• Use open source as a portfolio to build your career
• Understand when to end a project and conduct it responsibly

Who this book is for

This book is for software developers, product managers, project managers, business leaders, or general enthusiasts looking to start an open source project or currently maintaining one.

Table of Contents

1. The Whats and Whys of Open Source
2. What Makes a Good Open Source Project?
3. Open Source License and IP Management
4. Aligning the Business Value of Open Source for Your Employer
5. Governance and Hosting Models
6. Making Your Project Feel Welcoming
7. Growing Contributors to Maintainers
8. Dealing with Conflict
9. Handling Growth
10. Commercialization of Open Source
11. Open Source and the Talent Ecosystem
12. Marketing for Open Source – Advocacy and Outreach
13. Transitioning Leadership
14. Sunsetting an Open Source Project

About the Author

John Mertic is the director of program management for The Linux Foundation. Under his leadership, he has helped ASWF, ODPi, the Open Mainframe Project, and R Consortium accelerate open source innovation and transform industries. John had an open source career spanning two decades, both as a contributor to projects such as SugarCRM and PHP, and in open source leadership roles at SugarCRM, OW2, and OpenSocial. With an extensive open source background, he is a regular speaker at various Linux Foundation events and other industry trade shows each year. John is also an avid writer and has authored two books, The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications and Building on SugarCRM, as well as publishing articles on IBM developerWorks, Apple Developer Connection, and PHP Architect.