What questions do you have about participating in open source?

ideas.md

Are you new to open source? What sort of questions, concerns, or even fears do you have?

Culture

• How do I start contributing to other projects?
• How can I encourage contribution to my project?
• Who should have commit rights?
• What commitment am I making by opening my source?
• How do I establish a community?
• What expectations will the community have?
• How do I communicate with the community?
• What are some models of governance for an OSS project?
• How do I say 'no' without alienating potential allies?
• What if someone forks my project?
• How do I build trust with contributors? with the community?
• How can I get serious contributors to my project?

Workflow

• How do people collaborate in the OSS world?
• What’s a pull request?
• What’s a fork?
• How do I use branches?
• Is there a benefit to these models outside of OSS?
• How do I manage backlog, vision, roadmap?
• What should I expect when sending my very first pull request?
• What should I expect when receiving my very first pull request?

Licensing

• How do I choose a license?
• Can I use something with license X?
• What is a CLA and why do I need to sign one?
• When a consumer of my project has concerns about the terms of the license, what should I do? (since I'm not a lawyer)

Business

• How do I (or even should I) monetize my oss project?
• What implications does dual licensing have for business?
• Can I build a business around someone else's open project?

Misc

• Do we need open source? / What's the use of open source?
• How open source be applied to artifacts other than code? Content, hardware design, etc?
• How can I measure the success of my project?
• Provided some money flows in, how should it be dealt with with regards to contributors?
• Should I create a new competing project or contribute to an existing one?
• What's the difference between a simple code drop and a full community project?
• reporting a bug vs a pull request with a failing test.
• How do I find the "right" project to contribute to?

Tools

• community centers e.g. GitHub, CodePlex
• git clients
• collaboration tools, persistent chat
• Issue tracker, Blog post, Twitter, StackOverflow, Google group, mailing list -- What channel for which purpose?
• continuous integration solutions - teamcity.codebetter.com, travisci.org, appveyor, etc?

How do I contributing to other projects?

contribute or start contributing?

Also:

• How do I find projects to contribute to? (Shameless plug: http://up-for-grabs.net/)

How do I manage backlog, vision, roadmap?

Also:

• "How do I say 'no' without alienating potential allies?"
• "What if someone forks my project?"

How do I contributing to other projects?

Also:

• What should I expect when sending my very first pull request?

How do I communicate with the community?

Also:

• Issue tracker, Blog post, Twitter, StackOverflow, Google group, mailing list, .... What channel for which purpose?
• How can I measure the success of my project?

How do I (or even should I) monetize by oss project?

How do I (or even should I) monetize my oss project?

Also:

• Provided some money flows in, how should it be dealt with with regards to contributors ?

• Should I create a new competing project or contribute to an existing one?

Controversial: 😉

• Do we need open source? / What's the use of open source?

What expectations will the community have?

Also:

• How do you "build" trust?

Excellent suggestions. Keep it coming!

• One of the consumers doesn't abide to the terms of the licence. I am not a lawyer. What should I do?

Tools:

• CI: teamcity.codebetter.com, travisci.org

• My main platform is [Windows|MacOs X|Linux], should I care about other ones?

When reporting a bug, it's so much better if that can be accompanied by a pull request containing a failing unit test. This is of course more work for the bug reporter, but it really increases the chance of the bug getting proper attention and a fix.

There's a big difference between a basic code drop on GitHub vs building a full community project.

How do I find the "right" project for contributing? e.g. I'm a Firefox user. Should I contribute to Firefox then?
How to find a mentor who helps out for newbies?

Q: Why can I not get any (serious) contributors to my project?

Heck, I know scheme is niche, but hell... (I still find bugs here and there and IronScheme been going for almost 8 years, a second pair of eyes would be nice :o) )

Perhaps this list should be subdivided to "use-cases"/sub categories
I mean sub-categories similar to those

1. I have no project, but want to start one
2. I am new to OSS and want to participate
3. I have a new project, next steps
4. I have a project and small community, next steps

Thanks, I've tried to summarize and incorporate all the feedback up to this point.
@myarichuk I plan to do another pass over the questions with respect to grouping and organization. This intial structure is just a starting point.

I have also this questions about OSS way:

Culture

• How to motivate the community?
• What about date limitations? How to build a feature to specific date?
• How to manage risks? What if main contributor(s) is away unexpectedly?
• How to give actual information about goals and priorities of the project?

Workflow

• How to review pull requests and make changes to them?
• How to set up and control code and design convenions?

Tools

• What about different VCSs? Is Git suitable only?

this sometimes comes up when I talk with people about OSS --> What is my benefit of participating in OSS project?

From the consumer perspective:

• What are the risks to rely on an open source project? What should one ponder/take into account in order to minimize those risks?

Can I make money as an open source software developer?