Have you been considering launching an open source project? Doing so involves a series of decisions that can give you a proper chance at rallying community support, staying on the right side of the law, and building a strong user base. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish. In this post, you’ll find our newly updated collection of good, free resources to pay attention to if you’re starting an open source project.
The Open Source Definition is where every project leader should start when it comes to how open source projects should be distributed, and what actually qualifies as open source. It’s also good to review Open Standards requirements.
As we noted in this post, the Software Freedom Law Center has a set of very good online resources on how open source licenses and copyrights work, and much more. Legal issues are smart to anticipate up front. The authors are attorneys who were part of creating popular open source licenses. It’s also an excellent idea to keep up with urrent and archived editions of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review
