Development

Getting more out of your project (including more users!) Do you have an open source project, yet you feel that it could more users? You are not alone! Many other open source projects have the same problem. The good news is that with only a few steps, you can new and more active users. Time to learn how promotion can be done without the pushy tricks that marketing and salespeople use.

While ‘shopping’ for some libraries, it struck me how many open source software projects are suffering from basic mistakes. Well, mistakes might sound too harsh. What I mean are those things you find on a project, which could be better. They are usually things not considered by the developer, as we (developers) were never told about them. Doing 20+ years of open source development now, I can safely say I made many mistakes.

The world has changed a lot in the last era, especially when it comes to computing. This applies also to the services we run on our Linux systems. Some of these services (like rlogin), were previously the defacto tools to do administration. Now they are considered to be bad and insecure. What makes a service insecure? Services can become insecure when they have characteristics like: No (or weak) authentication No (or weak) encryption Insecure protocols Running as root Authentication insecurities One example might be if a program only requires a password or pin, without any information like an username.