Best ways of marketing an open source application to users and programmers

Question

Any Joe Blow can write a handy application and release it as open source but what's the point unless other users (to make the project worth while) and programmers (to improve the project) can find it.

Uploading an application's source to Source Forge might be a start but as of now there are 171,886 projects listed... who on earth is going to find it amongst that lot?!

Making source code freely downloadable from ones own website is another alternative but you need to have a popular website to make that alternative viable.

Have any Stack Overflow users released an open source application and ended up with a reasonable user base and development support?

If so, how did you do it? What marketing techniques have worked well?

Answer 1

SourceForge, CodePlex, and Google Code are best bets right now, in my opinion.

This is also a little bit subjective.

Answer 2

Google Code is another option for release, I'm sure there are others.

Open source efforts are grass-roots efforts. If your initial release is interesting, relatively feature-complete, and you get people involved through some social engineering, it will take off.

Answer 3

There are often sites like Free Gamer which have lists and announce new releases of/to open-source games. Find a popular one and e-mail the author about it. If you get the post, you can even try to get it Dugg or on reddit, or even Slashdotted (unlikely).

Answer 4

I can't say that I ever had a strong userbase, but I have a couple of very small php projects on sourforge that, beside being small gathered more than a thousand downloads in about two months, now after a year I found my projects listed on softpedia and other similar sites. I think that if your idea is good and may intrest other people sourceforge is the place to be, especially if you put up a minisite dedicated to support your project..

Answer 5

Advertise your project on mailing lists or forums specific to the topic (provided that sort of thing is encouraged on the list/forum). If your project is cool enough, try Slashdot.

Answer 6

It's old, but I still think Freshmeat serves a purpose. Although I must admit I no longer browse it every day like I did (many) years ago, submitting your releases to it doesn't take long so I think it's worth doing.

Answer 7

Reddit has a specific subreddit for promoting your project, see: http://www.reddit.com/r/codeprojects/.

For the rest, talk and ask questions, help other people, feature your projects on your profiles. Use open source repositories like Github/BitBucket etc.

Answer 8

There's really nothing different about it and traditional marketing. Get your name out there (this is your brand), have an interesting product, and push it enough to get people enthused about it, but not enough to annoy them.

Answer 9

Also :

• build a web site for your project instead of the default SourceForge project homepage,
• make sure to have a good design for your site, logo and application,
• ensure that your website is well referenced (importance of well chosen keywords),
• define very well your goal (what is and what does your app, what it doesn't) and write it,
• take special attention to your writing (specially if you're not native english speaker),
• register your application on big download sites like download.cnet.com and so on.

All this bullets points matters to bring and attract people on your project !

Answer 10

Make something useful, that solves a problem significantly better than current alternatives. Some popular and more niche products, and the problems they solved:

• Linux (Unix is expensive, Windows is expensive/sucks)
• MySQL (databases are expensive)
• jQuery (Cross-browser Javascript is too hard)
• Subversion (CVS doesn't work well with the Internet)
• Firefox (IE sucks)
• Ruby on Rails (Building simple database-backed websites takes too long)

So by all means market your product as the other posters indicated. But if you can't clearly say what compelling problem you're solving, and how your solution is better, it's not likely you'll have a lot of uptake.

The other side of this is your product should be somewhat usable when you announce/release it. There are/were a ton of projects in Sourceforge that won't compile, much less do anything. Make sure your early adopters have a reason to think they should check back later (or better, contribute).

Answer 11

As Jeff Atwood put it, via 37 Signals, you need an arch-enemy.

Answer 12

My open source projects catched momentum (and fairly quickly) by the following:

• Release the code on a renowned website like Sourceforge (people see SF and immediately believe in the open-ness of your project).

• Advertize on sites like Freshmeat. Freshmeat has impact on every announcement (for every release, make an announcement!). Basically a lot of user base was created in the 2-3 days after any freshmeat release announcement. Try to find more specialized sites as well, like happypenguin.org for games.

• Find other Open-Source projects or communities which are related and announce on their mailing lists/forums. Be nice and have your message being directed to the specific audience. They will not complain if your project is open source, your audience fits and you keep it in the right tone (and stay responsive to them!)

• Maybe find related IRC channels, and ask people, like "who wants to try my new awesome project related to XYZ?". Often I found single persons interested who then stayed with the project quite a while. A good network for OSS is Freenode.

• Get your software into distributions. This is harder for some than others. For example, for Arch Linux you can package and upload your package yourself (using AUR), then you can announce in the forums and try in IRC: "hey I packaged this awesome new software, somebody want to give it a shot?" For others like Debian, it is harder. You need to find a debian developer willing to maintain your package. On the other hand, there is lots of traffic on Ubuntu forums. Note that this is the best way to get a large, however less responsive user base. Thousands of people installed my software, but I only know because of statistics released by Debian, Ubuntu. Btw: the Ubuntu guys even fixed a bug in my software downstream which I adopted upstream. Great!

And finally: With users come developers. The more impact you get on users in general, the more developers will jump on your boat. You also have to enable this: Have an up to date website, with specific information for developers. Be reachable in easy terms. Communicate on your website what is the best/quickest way to contact you or other developers.

Answer 13

I've not released any code but have found a number of useful applications on The Code Project which will usually have source code available. These will usually link to a dedicated website that has been set up for the application.