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Ask HN: What makes a good open-source project? DO's and DON'Ts?

2 pointsby AndreVitorioover 2 years ago
A side-project of mine is gaining some traction but I&#x27;ve never really managed an OSS project before. I&#x27;ve only worked in commercial settings and my experience with Open source is minimal.<p>Any recommendations for resources and tips would be very appreciated. Thanks!

2 comments

ogartenover 2 years ago
Agreed with viraptor on using a license you are comfortable with right from the beginning.<p>The license also determines if your project will be used by companies. It also determines if you could potentially monetize the project later on if you want to. It&#x27;s always possible to relicense or have a dual-license but I find that confusing.<p>From my experience, the crucial part is to keep the community healthy and non-toxic. That&#x27;s really hard as a project grows to attract more and more people.<p>Your role will likely become that of the maintainer at some point of time. You won&#x27;t contribute much to the code. You will do code reviews, prioritize issues, ...
viraptorover 2 years ago
Everything exists with a slightly different context, so don&#x27;t expect some strict guidelines... maybe apart from &quot;It&#x27;s better if it exists&quot;. Just release it. You can figure out the details as you go: how to deal with contributions, issues, versioning, etc.<p>Also, while you can change your license down the track, it may be better to figure out which one you want to use from the beginning.