Making Your Code OSS-Appealing?

goldcd writes "A while back I wrote some pretty reasonable forum code, a PHPBB alternative. A few years down the line it's pretty stable, I've stopped tinkering with it, and it's standing up by itself. I have neither the time, inclination, nor inspiration to do anything more with it, but would very much like to give the code to the world to use and expand upon. Now I could just upload it as it is onto SourceForge, but currently it's very specific in its usage and I'd be ashamed of what 'proper' coders would think of my amateur offering — I'm afraid it would be laughed at and ignored. On the other hand, I don't want to waste hours of my own time perfecting it for people just to 'rip off' as is, and never contribute anything. My question is, what do you have to do to make your code 'OSS appealing?'"

Comments

Well

[SpacePunk]

Considering the majority of OSS code, if I were to release any of my code, I'd have to make it more amateurish.

Don't worry about it. There are those that will like it, those that won't, but they'll all cream their star wars underoos because it's free (as in beer).

Release it anonymously

[Colin Smith]

Problem solved.

Re:Just let them come

[vtcodger]

Sure EMACS is powerful. But that's almost irrelevant to the needs of program documentation. Mostly documentation authors don't need a lot of power. They need a modicum of communication ability, a basic text editor, and a willingness to do a not especially fun job.

(I'll pass on vi. If you can't say something nice ...)