Open Sourcing Is Not Easy

Bill Bumgarner:

Open sourcing a large body of source that has always been closed is really damned hard.

It takes a monumental amount of effort to do so and, once open, it takes a whole bunch of ongoing effort to keep it open in a productive fashion […].

At the lowest level, pretty much every line of code has to be reviewed to ensure that it isn’t offensive, doesn’t cross any number of lines (licensing, intellectual property, etc..), is formatted reasonably well, and every file must contain the appropriate header.

★ Monday, 17 July 2006