Last updated on November 21, 2018
Open source software, also known as free and open source software (FOSS), free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS), and free software, has become more and more popular these days. When starting a new open source software project, we developers tend to think mostly on the technical side of this project, e.g., what programming languages and frameworks to use, how to design the architecture of the software, what platforms to target at, etc. We not only think, we actually think about these really carefully: We look around for advice, struggle in our mind, and, sometimes, even after years, we still argue that we should rewrite the software in a different programming language. On the other hand, we often take the non-technical side too light without much thinking: We use a specific source code hosting service simply because everyone else uses it, we use a specific license simply because this is the only license that we are able to read through once and (vaguely) understand, etc. These decisions, however, will heavily affect the style, the advancement,or even the survival of our open source software projects.
This post aims at draw developers' attention to non-technical aspects of open source software projects. We will have a brief overview of some non-technical aspects that can be important in open source software projects (while more aspects and details can be further discussed in the future).