Tips to successfully build your open-source projects #0. Why should you open-source your project?
This might sound like an off-topic question, but I believe it is a great place to start this series of blog posts about tips to create successful open-source projects.
Everyone uses open-source
Many of my friends and co-workers use open-source projects every day to achieve whatever task assigned to them. It can range from the small JS library to fine-tune some web UI, to bigger frameworks like Ruby on Rails, including famous software like Apache. I don’t know any developer not using open-source projects at some point, and I strongly believe that you’d be a fool not to: why re-inventing the wheel or paying for it while it is there for free with all possible options and a bunch of people to make it even better?!
Everyone has projects to open-source
Many of these friends and co-workers have lots of side-projects in their minds and eventually code some of them whenever they can.
I’m pretty sure you do have some project ideas too: everyone has ideas! If you believe you don’t have any, maybe take a few minutes to think back about all the times you couldn’t find the perfect tools you were looking for: that’s ideas! Same thing, every time you told to your friends “that would be soooo coool to have a software that sends ‘STFU’ to Emmanuel every time I press some key of my keyboard”, that’s also ideas.
Most projects never get open-sourced
But when it comes to open-source them, most of my friends simply can’t step in and these projects stay on their own computer until their hard drive dies. Sometimes, these projects get pushed to a private Github repository but never get published publicly. Or at best, these projects are open-sourced, but not polished and nobody can find them.
I’m not talking about start-up ideas people are not willing to share. I’m talking about small libraries, scripts, tools, websites, … that they needed or wanted to create at some point and that definitely can be open-sourced. For example, I open-sourced a Ruby Gem to automatically register to some of my school courses: that's the kind of project I am referring to.
These projects should be open-sourced
One reason these projects never get open-sourced could be because the authors are afraid to show their own code publicly. Some others would think their project is not interesting or not useful, and basically not worth open-sourcing.
In the end, it all comes down to most people being impressed and anxious about the open-source world, as if it was only reserved for popular projects published by some elite developers.
I believe that’s a mistake. Every project has a purpose, is useful for some tasks, and will eventually be interesting for some people out there even though you don’t know them!
Never forget that some dude once wrote an app in 8 hours that can only send “yo” to your friends, released it for April Fools' and secured a $1.5M seed round at $5M to $10M valuation: if he went that far with such an app, then why can't you open-source your project?
Publishing to open-source can bring you some surprises, make you meet new people, and most-of-all, you can learn a lot from it. There is no reason to be afraid to share your code publicly. You might also end up helping some people that were looking for what you built, or some others by giving them some ideas for their own projects.
Even a small contribution is meaningful, and once you started, you won’t be able to stop. Share what you built, whatever it is!
Read all my tips to successfully build your open-source projects:
Originally published at https://cylix.github.io on September 9th, 2017.
