Slashdot Mirror
Challenges in Releasing Open Source Software?
Chris Vaughan asks: "Me and my Co-Workers at the Advanced Computing Research Lab are just about ready to release our first Open Source package on SourceForge.net I ask the Slashdot community what hurdles they had to overcome and how much involvement do they still have in their project years later. Also what types of licensing did you pick and why did it suit your project best? Our project, MyPBS is a PHP/MySQL/Perl frontend accounting package for the Portable Batch System (PBS). Which is used to account for super computing usage. I appreciate any comments you may have."
License: Pick the one that best suits your project and how you expect people to use it (or not). Normally SF requires that you use one of the OSI approved licenses.. For example, if your application is a library (doesn't seem to be) then you wouldn't want to use the GPL; OTOH the GPL is normally fine for standalone apps. If you're not sure, talk to a lawyer.
Other than that, in SourceForge the trick is to categorize your project in the Software Trove very carefully. Otherwise people will have trouble finding it. I've found stuff in Freshmeat through Google that I couldn't find browsing the trove because the developer miscategorized his/her work.
No one will use your stuff if they can't find it.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
MySQL has changed their licensing recently and they are very restrictive about which OSI Approved licenses are acceptable for use with their product (without paying the licensing fee). If it's not GPL, you are likely going to have issues. They have a very short list of what does and does not qualify. However, they are responsive when you write them at licensing@mysql.com (albeit it took several days) when you need clarification.
Apparently PostFix's OSI Approved IBM Public License does not qualify so I'm having to prep to pay for licensing since we use postfix with MySQL (confirmed with their licensing folks). They did assert that they were still in the process of reviewing other licenses.
You picked a good time to ask -- I just spent the last few hours putting out a new alpha release of the jSyncManager (http://www.jsyncmanager.org) up on our project site at SourceForge (http://sf.jsyncmanager.org).
(The jSyncManager is a pure-Java data synchronization solution for PalmOS based handhelds that is completely platform-neutral, with an open API, easy extensibility, and its own jConduit plug-in architecture).
I started this project back in 1997, writing the jSerial API, and latest the jSyncManager itself. It saw its first release (free, but under a closed-source license) in May 1999. It's gone through several iterations (including an IBM released version called ManplatoSync for Java), finally being released under an Open Source license in September 2002.
I not only work on it daily still, but I'm in the process of setting up a software service/integration/development company around it.
My biggest challenges include trying to involve other developers in the project -- we have a small core, and users do occassionally submit patches, but attracting Open Source developers that actually make any contributions can be a real hassle. If your experience turns out to be like mine, you'll have lots of good intentioned people offer to help out, but will have a very difficult time finding people who will actually do any work, or make contributions without prodding. It can take a while to find developers who are real gems (although when you do, you'll invariably find yourself making some good friends and contacts -- your core developers are your biggest asset).
Some suggestions:
As for licensing, I chose to release the API under the LGPL to allow developers to choose their own licensing for any plug-ins they develop that use the API, and the GPL for our applications and the core plug-ins that we've developed. In this way we can ensure that our applications and plug-ins can't be integrated into a closed-source project, and can't be modified and released as closed source by third parties, but they can develop closed-source applications that call our library (although any changes to the library sources must be released as Open Source). So far users appear to be very happy with this arrangement.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Projet Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
I mean, asking about license choices on Slashdot?
In all seriousness, though, like others have said, look at the various licenses out there (GPL, CPL, LGPL, BSD, CC, MIT) and decide what best fits your needs. You could even consider a multi-license scheme like Mozilla has.
As far as involvement, Sourceforge is a place to put it if you want development to continue. Someone has to admin the project (the CVS repo won't patch itself, and you don't want everyone to have write access), though, so if you don't want to be personally involved, find someone to give ownership of the project to (give the official-ness label to them, not necessarilly have them own the original IP) or put it on Freshmeat.
Some ideas of what I mean, first for the licences:
- is it for the greater good, and you don't mind telling people what to do (that's GPL)
- you (or your company) want(s) the credit, otherwise you do not care: look at something like BSD
- how much control do you want to keep over the code?
- do you expect patches, do you expect to use them in a closed-world scenario? (no GPL for you)
There are many more aspects you can consider. Or you don't care. It really depends on what your goals are.The other goal-dependend area is what you want to offer. If you just want the code out there so you can get people you know to download it: plain CVS is fine, forget the rest. Maybe upload a simple index.html onto the homepage.
If you want to reach people, you have to do more. First of all: do a decent (not fancy, but useful) website. You can get away with not updating too often (just don't put news on it if you don't plan to update), but you need a starting point for people. The SF pages and CVS are not nice, although your target audience might cope with it -- your project seems to be for rather experienced people.
How much support do you want to give? I love the support bit, helping people to use my programs gives me the kick :-) My projects thus use multiple mailing list, the webforums, a whole set of trackers (although not actively at the moment, but I will get notifications) and I try to get websites that pick interest. The latter is after all the place where I start looking at projects, and the "not there yet" often causes me to go away. Simple single page is ok, nothing is a killer unless I am really keen.
If you do not want that level of support or none at all -- turn the features off. Some contact email address is sufficient, maybe a mailing list. Noone really _needs_ web-forums and other stuff, they just help getting the casual visitors involved. Doesn't sound like your project, works for mine. Different goals, different audience --> different tools.
And a last one: SF is quite cool and they often surprise me with the quality of support you get for free; but don't expect a nice UI experience :-) The project admin bits are all over the place, sometimes you have to go into a feature section, then Admin, sometimes first Admin, then select the feature. The usual feedback is getting you back to the same page, but some more or less visible red result message somewhere on the page (mostly on top, but not always). It is not too bad, just don't have too high expectations :-)
HTH and wasn't too much of a waffle :-)
Peter
-- CAUTION: Don't read this posting.
There's a few basics you need to consider for your project page. What your project is, what it is used for, where to get it, how to use it, and where to go if you need help. There's a lot of SF projects that totally fail to provide that information to potential users.
The first thing your project site needs to tell me is what the hell the project is. Acronyms are nice and all but without some real words somewhere it is going to make it exceedingly difficult to tell the difference between MyPBS, phpBB, CBS, NBC, and FBI. This part should be in relatively simple terms with lots of keywords so search engines can easily find and rank it.
Unless it is glaringly obvious tell me what I might do with this. Your project might be just the thing I'm looking for but it also might be almost what I need. I might be able to adapt it and fire off an e-mail to you informing you of my extentions and your project can grow a little bit. If I'm looking for some particular bit of information out of two billion plus pages indexed in Google I'd notice your project if you make it simple for me to find such information.
Next tell me where I can pick up the latest and past releases of the project. I loathe having to skim through SourceForge's project pages to find a particular link to the latest release of some project. A couple of direct links won't kill you and they'll make my life easier.
Once I've got the sucker downloaded let me know how to install and use it. Well written instructions can mean the difference between your project growing and being popular or being stagnant and overlooked. Your potential users shouldn't have to pour over your source code to figure out how to use your software. If you feel static documentation is a little too daunting of a task make a documentation Wiki. Write out your initial set of instructions and such and let your users and developers amend those instructions as needed. Users who couldn't code to save their lives might be able to contribute some clarified instructions or maybe provide usage examples from their own experiences.
Finally provide me with a couple different means of communicating with members of the project team. If you really want to build a nice bit of software make it easy to form a community out of your users. Mailing lists, bulletin boards, and newsgroups help turn groups of overwise disconnected users into a connected community. I personally feel OSS projects work much better when the developers and users have a lot of interaction. With OSS users can often times be unofficial developers which makes this interaction all the more important.
As was already mentioned, your project page doesn't need to be some big parade of multimedia. As long as it conveys the information it is supposed to and is clearly laid out it doesn't matter what you do stylistically to it. If you don't intend to update the page often don't under any circumstances put a contemporary news section. If you feel the need for "news" post the changelogs for your latest releases or maybe a project status section. Few things are worse on OSS project pages than seeing "news" that is more than six months old despite an aggressive release schedule. HTH.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.