OStatic

10 Resources for Successfully Launching an Open Source Project

If you're in the process of launching an open source project, a little up-front footwork and howework can help things go smoothly, and even keep you out of trouble. 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, you'll find our updated collection 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, and what actually qualifies as open source. It's also good to review Open Standards requirements.

As we noted in a this 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.

For an easy to digest, plain language discussion of license types for open source projects, and which license will work best for your project, try FOSS License Wars. The  discussion is broken up into chapters that you can skim as you see fit, and the information is solid. It's also an excellent idea to visit SourceForge, and review the many projects housed there, which types of licenses they have, how their communities work, and more. Should your project be housed there?

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 at any time in our Member Questions area (see the Questions button on the home page) and you'll get answers from experts. You can also read some of OStatic's many interviews with open source project leaders, some of them found here, here, and here.

• licenses
• development
• SourceForge

Share Your Comments