When it comes to putting together an open source project, a little up-front footwork goes a long way. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish, and to stay safe. Fortunately, just as free availability is a mantra for open source products, it is for many helpful resources too. In this post, I'll round up a number of good, free resources to pay attention to if you're doing an open source project--or if your organization is deploying open source software.
The Open Source Definition is where every project leader should start when it comes to how open source projects should be distributed. It's also good to review Open Standard requirements.
As Mike noted in a recent post, the Software Freedom Law Center has a set of very good online resources on how open source licenses and copyrights work, and much more. Legal issues are smart to anticipate up front. The authors are attorneys who were part of creating popular open source licenses.
If you're stitching together open source code or deploying applications, Hewlett-Packard's free application Fossology is designed to analyze the source code for any project and report accurately on which licenses are being used.
For developers who want learning resources, Developer.com offers useful tutorials on topics such as Python programming, and W3Schools has excellent, free tutorials on web development topics.
Fossbazaar is a good starting point for many kinds of open source resources pertaining to overseeing the use of open source software in an organization--or governance. There are numerous articles on policies and best practices, License Compliance, copyrights and IP issues and more.
Finally, don't forget that OStatic itself is an excellent forum for getting questions answered. Type a question in any time in our Member Questions area and you'll get answers from experts.
There are lots more good resources online. Which ones would you recommend to the open source community?
Comments
Add CommentBy Jack Stiles on Apr. 03, 2008
I think you missed the BIG one - Sourceforge.net. You can't start deploying Open source software before looking at sourceforge for other projects, forums, etc. etc. Chances are your project (or something similar) will be hosted on Sourceforge. It is the best place to host a new project as well - you tend to get the maximum visibility on there!
By Sam Dean on Apr. 03, 2008
Yep, SourceForge is a good one, too--especially like the forums.
By an anonymous user on Apr. 04, 2008
Fossology is still being very nascent and I don't think its ready to provide any meaningful results.
By an anonymous user on Apr. 05, 2008
pitiful
By Dan Stangel at the fossology project on Apr. 10, 2008
Regarding fossology "still being very nascent and [... not] ready to provide any meaningful results", I'd like to invite the commentator to help us make fossology better by posting suggestions to the mailing list or joining our public IRC channel for an informal chat. We think the license analysis that fossology provides is second to none in terms of thoroughness and accuracy, and open source license analysis is just the beginning! If we're wrong about that, we want to know so we can fix it! More information online at http://fossology.org/
Thanks! Dan
Share Your Comments
Trackback URL
http://ostatic.com/trackback/158814