Things I’ve enjoyed reading about open source in 2016

I started this post back in February after reading Nadia Eghbal’s “What success really looks like in open source” so that I’d have something other than tweets to reference when I wanted to refer back to some good stuff.

So here’s a list, not in any particular order, and including the article already mentioned, of some things I’ve enjoyed reading about open source in 2016:

• What success really looks like in open source
• Advice To Open Source Project Contributors
• Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure
• The MIT License, Line by Line
• Is This Still Maintained?
• Dissecting The Myth That Open Source Software Is Not Commercial
• Lemonade Stand, a handy guide to financial support for open source.
• My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project

There were many more great articles that I likely forgot to add here, but that list is a good one to revisit.

The next two are videos. The first is Pieter Hintjens on building open source communities. I was so in love with this talk from the beginning that I opened a new post window to start writing while I was watching.

Pieter Hintjens on Building Open Source Communities

Hintjens, who passed away earlier this year, left behind a so very useful body of work in his writings on open source, development, and everything else. I know I’ll continue to go back and discover nice pieces.

The next video is Joshua Matthews on optimizing your open source project for contribution. Yet another one where I was just nodding along the entire time. I know I picked up a few useful tips from this.

I kind of like that I kept this post rolling this year, so I’m going to try to do the same thing next year. It’d probably be good if I wrote a sentence or two along the way on why I felt the piece was important enough to revisit!

Enjoy and feel free to send me links on open source that you think might be missing from the list above.