> “The things you need for a successful open source project overlap with what you need for a successful commercial product,” [..] “That includes documentation, localization, marketing, graphic design, testing, community management, and release management.”
Most open source software has none of that. If you want it to be popular, and sit around smelling your own farts because of how many GitHub Stars your project has, then all that's great. Absolutely unnecessary to make open source that people will use.
Just keep committing, be easy to contact, make it stupid easy for people to contribute, and rapidly iterate on contributions (do not let PRs and issues sit for months or wait months to reply to an e-mail). Mailing lists, chat rooms and forums are all good ways to allow other people to solve problems ad-hoc. Avoid anything that attracts spam.
Personally I find "corporate" open source very annoying. There's often 3 different websites and the docs are buried somewhere deep. Yeah you have a great mascot and splash page, but I'm an actual developer trying to solve an actual problem. When I do find the docs website, the docs I want aren't even on the website, they're somewhere in the repo. The README doesn't tell me where, though, it's just another splash page that doesn't even link to the docs website. Oh, I need to jump through 15 hoops to join your private Slack to ask you a question? Oh, I need to sign up for your weird private Jira instance to submit a bug? Sign away my life with this weird contributor agreement? Screw it, i'll use a different project.
Most open source software has none of that. If you want it to be popular, and sit around smelling your own farts because of how many GitHub Stars your project has, then all that's great. Absolutely unnecessary to make open source that people will use.
Just keep committing, be easy to contact, make it stupid easy for people to contribute, and rapidly iterate on contributions (do not let PRs and issues sit for months or wait months to reply to an e-mail). Mailing lists, chat rooms and forums are all good ways to allow other people to solve problems ad-hoc. Avoid anything that attracts spam.
Personally I find "corporate" open source very annoying. There's often 3 different websites and the docs are buried somewhere deep. Yeah you have a great mascot and splash page, but I'm an actual developer trying to solve an actual problem. When I do find the docs website, the docs I want aren't even on the website, they're somewhere in the repo. The README doesn't tell me where, though, it's just another splash page that doesn't even link to the docs website. Oh, I need to jump through 15 hoops to join your private Slack to ask you a question? Oh, I need to sign up for your weird private Jira instance to submit a bug? Sign away my life with this weird contributor agreement? Screw it, i'll use a different project.