My thoughts about Open Source
Open source, what’s it?
From my point of view, Open source is a perfect example to explain the value of sharing. You do things that will be used by others.
Open source is a way to share our knowledge with other people without expecting anything in return,
5 Lessons learned
Don’t expect to be thanked
Nobody is required to appreciate your job. Even though people save time by making use of your code, they probably won’t thank you
You will really appreciate when someone stars your repositories or just gives you the thank you for your job. That’s so appreciated!
Be ready to face trolls
Along my time doing Open source, I’ve found lot of bad responses when I’ve asked for feedback. You must’n stop your job due to this kind of people. Sometimes they will be right, but most of time not
You will feel so happy when someone replies the trolls and defends your job like if they were the owners.
You won’t be rich by doing Open source
Don’t expect gain money by doing Open source. Even you display a donation button, nobody will use it.
Doing Open source is your best cover letter. When I interview someone, my first question always is , Do you have a Github account?
There’re many projects like yours
You won’t the be the only one doing a thing. It’s so hard have an idea and nobody copies it. And you must assume that your project won’t be at the top of the rankings.
It’s really quite comforting.when the performance of your project is better than other projects that doing the same.
Your project won’t have as many users as you expected
You must be ready to be the only consumer of your project. It’s complicated do something that people want to use. Even though you spend time on announcing, that won’t guarantee your project will succeed.
Yo feel so good when people tell you that your project is being used by them.
5 tips from my experience
Don’t insist that people must use your projects. They should use it because they want no because you want it.
When colleagues don’t want to use your software, but you force them to use it, they will end up detesting it.
Do not reinvent the wheel. Don’t spend your time on copying ideas (or even the code) and doing the same unless you can offer something new.
Instead of copying and refactoring projects, we should collaborate with the existing ones.
Learn from retrieved feedback. Be open mind and ask for feedback in forums, in twitter wherever. Announce your projects but ask for feedback too.
Your idea can be great, but your goal will be that your project resolves the needs of the people.
Don’t seek popularity. Don’t do Open source because you’re in search of been well recognized by your boss.
When a guy from the other part of the world spends his own time on helping you in your project… That’s being recognized!
Work on projects that do different things that you do at work
Open source give us the chance of doing whatever we want… It would be stupid copy an idea from our work and trying to make it open source.
Thank you so much for spend your time on reading this post!
If you’re not experienced doing Open source I hope this article makes you think about starting to do it!
