[TOS] Guidelines on launching an open source project?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi T. F.,

On Mon, 25 Jun 2012 23:55:54 -0400
pawlicki at cs.rochester.edu wrote:

> 
>    I been asked to help take a fairly extensive body of code and
> release it as an open source project.
> 
> I'm wondering if someone can point me to some resources that
> might guide us along this process?

See:

1.
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/How_to_start_contributing_to_or_using_Open_Source_Software

2. http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/foss-other-beasts/

3. http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

4. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

If you're interested in hosting a Mercurial repository (note that cloning it
there will also make all the history available, due to Mercurial's distributed
nature) look at one of those:

1. https://bitbucket.org/ .

2. http://code.google.com/ .

3. http://sourceforge.net/ .

4. There are more here which may be suitable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities .

You'll also need to pick up an open-source licence for the code.

> 
>  My collaborators have a body of code used for physics simulation.
> It's all under Mercurial for internal management. They want to
> distribute it under an open source model, while maintaining control
> of the "official" version.
> 

Well, what do you mean by "maintaining control"? If you just want to make sure
nobody else will be able to release releases under the official name, then this
is normally a given, and is enforce by licences such as
http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0 . Do you mean anything else?

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish


>   Any pointers, guidelines, or advice would be appreciated.
> 
> T. F. Pawlicki
> Dept. Computer Science
> University of Rochester
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> tos mailing list
> tos at teachingopensource.org
> http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos



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