Open Source
How to promote your open source project
Do you run an open source project and feel that it can use more users? Even if you are not a marketing guru, these promotion steps will boost your project!
Summary
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.
First-time open source contributor: Eric Light
Never contributed to a project before and like to know why you could or should? Here is an experience by a first-time contributor Eric Light.
Summary
Thoughts from a first-time contributor to open source software
In this article, we learn from a first-time contributor to open source. His name is Eric Light and lives in New Zealand. We came in contact via the Lynis project and I interviewed him to share his experiences.
MB: Thanks for taking the time Eric. Can you describe a little bit about yourself?
Why we use your open source project (or not)
Here are the most common mistakes made by open source projects, and tips on how to avoid them. Get more users with the right promotion!
Summary
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. Time to get them all fixed and document them, part of the open source community. I’m Michael Boelen, and you may know some of my work, like Rootkit Hunter (rkhunter) and Lynis. Here are some of the lessons I learned. You can use them next time when choosing a new open source project and make a better judgment call. If you are developer, then you can use these lessons to improve your own project.
The Non-Technical Changelog: Insights of 6 Months Development
The lessons we learned about open source during the last 6 months, while developing our security auditing tool Lynis. Apply these insights to your projects.
Summary
Lessons learned between our last and current release
The Lynis project team is proud to announce a new release of our security auditing tool. With months of work and a variety of changes, we bumped up the version to a “zero release” (2.2.0). The technical changelog is included in the download. We consider it to be a stable release, yet ask all to test it first.
Being the original author of Lynis, there is an additional background behind a changelog, which might be even more interesting. With this post, I want to share some of the background going into open source development. We have both our challenges and victories. Let me share some of our insights, in the same “open” spirit we develop our software.