Maintaining Open Source Projects

Pitch

There are many aspects to fostering an open source project: building community, promoting the library, maintaining good communication, among other factors. This book is our take on how to create, grow and maintain a successful open source project.

Thesis

A successful open source project is not only one that is original, solves a particular problem well, or has pristine code quality. Those are but the tip of the iceberg, which we'll thoroughly dissect with this book.

Who is the target audience of this book?

Any person or company that is a maintainer of an open source project, or is considering becoming one, should read this book.

If have a public repository, and someone you don't know is using it, you will find this book useful.

Managers or company owners who apply or want to apply open source practices in their day-to-day work will also find this book helpful.

Why do they want to buy and read it?

Your project may have a following and you don't know how to communicate with it, prioritize their requests, how and when to answer questions.

You want to learn the communication patterns that make it possible for large and popular Open Source projects to move forward, while your 5-people team can't come to agreement on things like how to name a variable.

You want to make sure your bar is high enough for providing a reliable project to your following.

You want to follow best practices but can't know them all. For example, when to release new versions, how to decide version numbers, when to open source, when to add contributors, and what to automate.

You want to get your project more attention and grow its user base.

Building a release

Building requires paperback gem, which is not free software yet.

Run make release. It will update the release branch with latest build from master.

See latest releases in https://github.com/thoughtbot/maintaining-open-source-projects/tree/release/release.