Promotion

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.