How to make a FOSS project

Published
2015-10-02
Last modified
2015-10-02

Introduction

This guide outlines how a FOSS project should be made. I am writing this because making a FOSS project is not obvious, especially for programmers who are by nature not well-versed in paperwork, management, and things of such nature. I have had some experience creating and maintaining FOSS projects, and I have had the luxury of reading a well-written book on the subject (unfortunately, I have forgotten its name and can no longer find it). However, that book was a veritable tome, and very few people enjoy reading such a long technical text, hence this guide.

The aim of this guide is to lay out the fundamental parts of a good FOSS project as concisely as possible, to stem the growing tide of poor FOSS projects.

This first part describes a FOSS project abstractly, while a forthcoming second part describes the available tools and services for making a FOSS project in practice, and future parts may cover certain topics in detail (documentation, for example).

Crazy axe murderer principle

The guiding principle behind all of this is that somewhere out there is a fellow programmer cum crazy axe murderer. You do not want him to become frustrated with your FOSS project because he will come to hunt you down, and you better be able to convince him that he's the one in the wrong, not you.

If your project lacks a homepage and thus Crazy Axe Murderer cannot find the documentation, you're screwed.

If Crazy Axe Murderer wants to file a bug report and he cannot find out how to do so, you're screwed.

If your project lacks proper documentation, you're screwed.

If Crazy Axe Murderer wants to contact you to shout at you about all of the above, but he cannot even find a single email address to use, you're a special kind of screwed.

If you follow this principle, you should be in good shape.

The homepage

Your project must have a homepage. The homepage serves as the heart of your project. Every other part of your project links to the homepage and can be found on the homepage. When a user or developer finds your homepage, they will have easy access to every single part of your project: the code, release news, contact information, contribution guidelines, documentation, everything.

The homepage does not have to be pretty, it just needs to make all the necessary information available as easily as possible.

The documentation

Your project needs documentation, and I mean this seriously, not in a "yeah we know, but we're developers, who actually writes documentation?" sense.

Your documentation should cover the following:

There are two extremes you are aiming to avoid (excluding the degenerate case where you don't have any documentation at all):

  1. You have a usage guide but no comprehensive API reference. The user can get started very quickly, but just as quickly hits a brick wall where the features he wants to use are only partially documented or not documented at all. This case seems to be the most common.
  2. You have a comprehensive API reference but no accessible usage guide. While all the information is there, a new user has no idea where to start looking.

The code

It goes without saying that as a FOSS project you need code. Developers speak code, so the code itself is generally not a big problem. However, developers do not generally speak law or management, and there are a few critical points here.

The license

First, you need to pick a FOSS license to use and properly apply to your code. Common choices are the GPL, Apache, and MIT licenses, although I suggest the GPL or Apache licenses, which have the legal support of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

You need to include a copy of the entire license with your source code and add a header to the top of every single source file covered by the license.

The FSF's website contains detailed information about licensing, which is backed by legal counsel. You should go read it.

If you do not include a license or apply it properly, your code will receive the default legal protection of "All Rights Reserved", i.e. your code will be proprietary software.

Version control

You need to use a distributed version control system. A version control system is mandatory, and for a FOSS project it really needs to be distributed, like Git or Mercurial.

A public repository of your code should be accessible from the homepage.

The source distribution

Your project's source code repository should be what I shall call "source distribution ready". That is to say, a clone or snapshot of your source code should be ready for distribution as a finished software product.

It should include everything necessary to build the software, including scripts and files used for the build process, the documentation, a README, a change log, and the source code license at a minimum.

Someone should be able to put this source distribution on a USB drive (along with the source distributions of any necessary dependencies), take it into an isolated room without Internet, and compile, install, and use your software.

Ideally, you should provide actual source distributions (in archive format, like .tar.gz) for your releases, but using your source code repository as your source distribution is acceptable.

(Note that you shouldn't be including external dependencies in your source distribution. Those external dependencies, if they are also FOSS, should have their own source distributions.)

Project management

This section covers boring management stuff that is nevertheless important to the running of the project.

Project communication

You need clear communcation channels for development and support for your project. For a small project, this can be as simple as posting your email on the homepage, and for a large project, this can be as complex as an integrated forum, IRC, and mailing list solution.

You need communcation channels for your project. They must be easily accessible and usable. The maintainers and developers for the project must use them, which is to say that development communication should be public.

Bug reporting

You need to have a bug tracker. This allows users and developers to track bugs. This might sound stupidly pedantic, but there are a lot of FOSS projects that lack this. You need this.

Contribution guidelines

There are two parts to contribution guidelines. One is providing guidelines for how bug reports should look like, how patches should look like, how code should look like, how commits are made, and so on. This will keep the project consistent and running smoothly in the long run.

The other part is the legal rights and licensing guidelines. You need to spell these out so you don't run into trouble later on.

Here's a quick introduction (disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer):

  • The person who writes the code owns the copyright over that code. Copyright is ultimate power.
  • Licenses are given by the copyright holder to other people so that they can use the code.

If a contributor uses a FOSS license for their code, the project may be able to use that code, depending on license compatibility. However the project cannot change that license in the future unless the contributor also hands over his copyright to the project (or the license explicitly states so).

This is a serious issue, and this is the reason why the Linux kernel is stuck on the inferior GPLv2 instead of the superior GPLv3: the kernel project never got the copyrights from the original contributors of all of its code, so it cannot change the license of that code.

GPLv3 solves this problem somewhat by explicitly allowing a license upgrade to future versions of the GPL even if you do not own copyright.

This is messy legal territory, so I'll only give one piece of non-expert legal advice:

The project should be licensed under GPLv3 (it's important to use version 3 of the license for the reason stated above). Contributors keep their copyright over code they have written, but they license it under GPLv3, giving the project full legal rights to use that code and allowing for upgrades to future versions of the GPL.

Project governance

If/when your project grows large enough, you will need to seriously consider setting up the formal governance of the project: who owns what parts of the project, who has which rights and powers, how power should be granted or taken away, and so on.

This is far outside the scope of the majority of projects, so I won't go into further detail.

Conclusion

Here concludes this guide. Please send any comments or corrections to darkfeline@felesatra.moe.