A bit of news about OpenRemote that came out this week:
OpenRemote: Community will drive home automation
It's a good read. One of the aspects it touches on is the building of a community and bootstrapping a codebase. There are a lot of myths and legends about how an Open Source community works. I found the following blog pretty much dead-on with explaining and debunking many of the myths:
Recognizing and Avoiding Common Open Source Community Pitfalls
The myths discussed (really worth a read the full article):
- Build it and they will come.
- Your community will help you build hard difficult feature X.
- Directional fallacies.
- Contributions are free.
- Profit models.
- Folks can understand your code.
- Documentation updates.
- Everyone using App X will give back freely and without asking.
- Contributors are like coworkers.
- Resources grow on trees.
- Cross distribution support is easy.
- Users help users and it's ok to just be a developer.
- Cross-project collaboration is easy.
There are many very good insights there.
