I've made something that might be useful to the community. Now what?

Question

If the specifics are important, I made a cruisecontrol.net publisher plugin that notifies a series of phone numbers via voice, announcing the current state of the build. It uses Twilio to do so.

I'd like to avoid getting hung up on the specifics of what it is I've made, as I have this question a lot, with a number of little hobby one-offs. What's the state of the art as far as making my hobby output available to the world at large?

There seem to be a lot of options for open-source project hosting, community features, and what role to take in all of this. It's a little bewildering. What I'm looking for is to put this out into the wild for free and basically take a hands-off approach from there. Is that realistic? Which project hosting service can I use for free to allow developers to at least download the code, report issues and collaborate with each other to improve the product?

What snags have you run into that could make me regret this decision? I'm interested in war stories, advice and guidance on making this little product available to the community where it can be used.

Answer 1

If it's just a small example, or a small piece of code, you might think about just posting an ariticle on a site like "Code Project", or a blog.

There's a lot of overhead with releasing an open-source project, and if you want to be hands-off, you might have an easier time just writing an article, and providing a .zip to download the code example.

Answer 2

Take a look at SourceForge.net, which is a website where programmers can create their open-source projects. It allows you to add new users which may have different rights on your project (from just being a contributer to being a full administrator) and it features many tools which you might want to use for your project, such as a bug tracker and SVN.

Answer 3

One easy way to quickly get code on a publicly accessible host is github.com. Hosting is free if everything you host is available to the public. People would be able to grab latest, and notify you when they have updates they think are worth merging.

You would include documentation as a README.

CodeProject is cool, sites like that would allow more community discussion then what I've seen on Github.

Answer 4

GoogleCode is a decent self repository for open source code. Very easy to use and contains the ability to create a wiki for the project. It also has a very easy to use and understand bug reporting/forum style issue management system.

Answer 5

CodePlex is another good place for posting projects. There's lot's of C#/.NET there. In addition to all the basic project hosting stuff one of the nice things about it is that they support a whole slew of source control clients.