Starting an open source project

3/03/2012

Salvius the open source
robot

You may already be aware Salvius is an open source robot currently released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. All of the robot's source code if freely available under the downloads label on the left sidebar. One of the benefits of any open source project is that anyone can modify the existing material to fit their own needs. Open source programmers also don't have to worry about their code leaking out onto the internet because for them it is actually a good thing. Having lots of people continuously using and modifying the code for a project and posting it on other sites helps to fix bugs that a programmer may not see at first. Sometimes it takes a second set of eyes to find a problem because in our minds we automatically correct our own work because we know what it should look like. You may also find that someone thinks of a more efficient way of doing something since in programming there is almost infinite ways to solve any problem. What a good programmer will do is write code that solves a problem using the least amount of steps and the least amount of processing power.

Starting and sustaining an open source project are two completely different things. To start an open source project you need a website where people can learn about the project and gain access to the source material. Running an open source project usually involves creating a forum or some sort of social medium where people can share, comment on, or submit code. In order to sustain your project it is important to set goals for what you want your project to be able to do. As an example I set many goals for what I want my robot to be able to do. Some of the goals I am just within a hairsbreadth of accomplishing and others may take me many more years.

I did a search online to find out what other people have to say about starting a good open source project. This is what I came up with:

"You must be wary of the term "Open Source Community" because no such community exists. Instead there are thousands of individual communities. Yes, many people participate in several communities, but no one participates in all, and most don't participate so much as watch. Like any good spectator sport though, it's always more fun to play than to watch" - (fishybell from http://ask.slashdot.org)

"open source enables is the aggregation of passionate users that can make tweaks that support their own vision and requirements for a product. The ability to look under the hood and make changes/ additions and then contribute the modified code back to the community creates an effect where the code becomes progressively more useful over tim" - (Vijay Goel http://www.innovationinthecrowd.com)

"Learning what it takes to create and grow an open source project is trapped in the brains of many people. Many people want to know what makes a project tick, how it actually gets things done." - (Karsten Wade from http://www.socallinuxexpo.org)