Open-sourcing a mobile app

Question

I'm considering making an existing mobile app into an open-source project. It has an Android and iPhone version.

While I have used open-source projects and submitted feature requests and bug reports, I have never created an open-source project nor contributed with a patch to an existing one.

What are the top things that I should take into account before opening the source of my project? What specific steps do you recommend taking for open-sourcing a mobile app?

Answer 1

You are lucky as when I started to run open source projects I did not realize this great book exists,

http://producingoss.com/

It provides general tips in almost all aspects of running an open source project, and you can add your own for mobile world.

Answer 2

GoogleCode is a good place to upload your project. There you will have an issue tracker and a wiki to write about it.

Answer 3

For a truely awesome OSS application I would suggest that you use git. Free hosting for git is provided by github. A good starting point for using git is http://learn.github.com/

As far as FOSS development is concerned, its not very different from usual development. But here you will have to don different roles like product manager, developer and tester too.

Other things that you need to take care of.

1. Since you are the initiator of it, you need to take control of its development.

2. Your code should be easy to be understood by others. Documentation is of utmost importance for other developers to start off.

3. Dont be offended if someone creates a fork of your project. Know to protect yourself by putting appropriate license, like, GPLV3 or any other that you find appropriate.

Answer 4

You can publish you code on googleCode, SourceForge or Github, use all the power of theses websites (documentation, notes etc..) will help contributors.

And don't forget to comment your code ;-)