Advice for starting a new project?

[John Van Ostrand]

Kareem Shehata wrote:
> I’ve had an idea in my head (and on paper, er… notepad) for about a year now
> for what could turn into an open source project.  Truth be told, I know the
> shape of what I want to make, but I have no idea how to actually do it:
> FOSS, start a small company and build it proprietary, design the
> architecture and then license it, or look at academic forums.  I’m leaning
> towards FOSS because I think it’ll fit the project as well as my personal
> beliefs and values, but I have no idea what it takes to go down that road.
>  So I thought I’d check here and see if anyone has tried this road and can
> give any advice, or know of someone I should talk with.  I’m thinking of
> heading to Waterloo to chat with Roger Dingledine, since the project has
> similarities to his.  Anyone in the Toronto area who has started or is
> running a FOSS project?
>
> BTW: I’d love nothing better than to put out all of the details on the idea,
> but at this point the idea of “intellectual property” scares the crap out of
> me.  What if some unscrupulous company takes the idea, makes a prototype,
> and patents it?  So, for the moment I won’t talk details (and in return I’m
> not asking for any kind of commitments from anyone), but any and all advice
> would be appreciated.
>   
We have started small open source projects and here is what we've found.

1. Expect to do a lot of the development yourself. It may take months or 
years to build a community around your project.

Projects won't advertise themselves, so you have to look at this as a 
conventional product in the beginning. You'll have to do most of the 
development yourself, or find others with the same need and convince 
them to help out right off the start. The better you advertise, the 
faster you'll build a community and gain testers, users, documenters, 
developers, supporters, etc. Expect it to take a while to get payback.

2. Use sourceforge or some other "community" site. It gives instant 
exposure and lowers your cost of supporting the project.

3. Release early and release often. There are way too many "stillborn" 
projects in sourceforge. Also projects that has a last modified date 
years old could easily be considered stale, a dead-end.

4. Pay attention to your developers and users. This may not matter to 
you but imagine the feeling if someone forks your project and it becomes 
more successful than yours (Mambo - Joomal, NCSA - Apache http.) This 
doesn't mean doing everything they say, it means convincing them that 
your decision (either for or against their recommendation) is the right 
thing to do.

5. If you intend to close source your project (like MySQL, Asterisk) 
you'll have to obtain waivers from your developers that essentially give 
all copyright to you. This will turn away some or many potential 
developers and put more of the development burden on yourself. You will 
also have to be careful about which libraries you use and which code you 
use.

6. Use typical programming management like coding styles and code 
review. Don't be afraid to manage your developers. There's nothing worse 
than bad programming.

7. Make the easiest but useful piece first. This will help give you 
value, in using the product, but it will also give potential developers 
something useful to build on and it will help to create a community.

8. Somewhere down the line consider building a call-home feature into 
the product. It would have to be useful like an auto-update. This will 
be the only way you can really gauge how large your user base it.

I hope this helps.

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