Open Source Support
Open Source Support
About the Book
This book is intended to be a resource for anybody who is making code freely available on the internet. I do my best to lay out resources you can use to provide free open source software support, as well as potential ways to get paid for the support you do.
About the Writing Style
I'm a big fan of the Minimal Viable Product principle. This means that I've written initial content for all of my chapters, and I am offering that to you at this time. I have my own roadmap, but I hope to get feedback on what readers think I should improve, so that I can support you in the best way possible. I will do my best to include detailed information in the Changenotes that gets sent by Leanpub when the book is updated, so that you've got an idea how things are being improved.
About the Author
About the Contributors
Ryan has been writing books and documentation for programming languages for over a decade. These books have sold over 20,000 copies worldwide.
Ryan lives in the lovely coastal town of Warrnambool, Australia.
Table of Contents
-
Should I?
- Provide Support?
- Write Good Code
- Write Documentation
-
Why should I provide support?
- Name Recognition
- Portfolio
- Money
- Karma
-
What venues should I use to provide support?
- README
- Wiki
- Guides
- Google Groups/Forum
- Live Chat
- Social Networks
-
How do I balance my time between code and support?
- Contributing Guidelines
- Prioritizing Issues
-
How do I get people to pay for the support I offer for free?
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)
- Offer a product that companies can’t live without
- Be Awesome
- Feature Bounties
- Kickstarter
- Consulting
- Commercial Product
-
Teaching a Programmer to Code Recursive Fish
- Getting users to file quality issues
- Getting users to fix their own issue
- Getting users to keep coming back
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