Software Development
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?
Secure Software Development: CII Best Practices
Best Practices from the OpenSSF project help creating more security open source software projects. Learn what they do and how it can help your project.
Summary
Last month the Core Infrastructure Initiative, or CII, launched their CII best practices project (now OpenSSF Best Practices Badge Program). Its primary goal is to gamify the process of building more secure software. Let’s have a look at the project, and how it can help.
Open Source and Security
If we look in the open source world of software, we see that many projects were created by volunteers. While doing this voluntary, this doesn’t say anything about the quality of the project. After all, half of the internet exists because of these small, yet powerful utilities. I personally created two projects myself: Rootkit Hunter (rkhunter) to detect malware, and Lynis to perform a security audit on Linux and UNIX systems. While these tools are focused on security, it is definitely not simple to make software itself secure. This is where a project of CII comes in, to provide a checklist of items to enhance the project and its quality.
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.