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Challenges in Releasing Open Source Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the determining-the-hurdles dept.

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."

2 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. No problems by pauljlucas · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Personally, I think all the machinery Sourceforge offers is overkill for most projects. (I also don't like the idea of my main CVS repository being on a machine I don't own.)

    For the open-source projects I have, I simple made them available via freshmeat. My CVS repository is on my own machine. I have the projects' home pages on a seperate web server machine. That's it.

    As for remaining involved, I'm still involved almost exclusively. I know the romanticized "bazarr" model of development envisions lots of contributors. The reality is that most open-source projects just get downloaded. Rarely do they accumulate talented people who make contributions. For all my projects combined, I've maybe gotten a handful of patches over the years (and most of those were pretty crappy quality, so I ended up rewriting them).

    Hence, unless you expect your project to be wildly successful, don't expect much of anything, problems or otherwise.

    --
    If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
  2. Me and my Co-Workers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Me and my Co-Workers

    "My Co-Workers and I".