How to maintain an open source project

I have talked with you a lot about how to participate in an open source project, and today I will talk with you about how to maintain an open source project.

Open source projects are not collections of code: each open source project can be thought of as a small company with its own market position, its own strategic goals, and its own user audience. Therefore, open source project maintenance has a lot of work outside of engineering, including but not limited to communicating with users, setting roadmaps, and so on. This article aims to provide a basic guide for newcomers to the ranks of open source maintainers, explaining what an open source maintainer should need to do.

First Day

Before starting a project, open source maintainers need to figure out the target market and positioning of the project.

clear market

The development of open source projects also generally follows Matthew’s Law of the Stronger: A specific vertical field can only accommodate one or two widely used projects.

So before starting a project we must consider:

• Where does the project want to develop?
• Who are the important players in this field?
• What are the irreplaceable advantages of our project?

If we can’t do better than the existing project, we might as well just give up and join the existing project. Otherwise, we need to further subdivide the field and find our own differentiation advantages.

For example, SmartX recently launched a new open source project virtink , a lighter Kubernetes native virtualization management engine. Compared with the existing kubevirt in the community, it does not consider the ability to support the simulation of legacy hardware devices and desktop application scenarios, but focuses on running modern cloud virtualization workloads on Kubernetes, so Virtink can be more secure and lightweight. way to support virtualized workloads.

Of course, the current market is not static: ByteDance’s open-source monoio was originally a high-performance Rust Runtime based on the io-uring thread-per-core model, but support for tokio mio has been gradually added in the evolution of the community.

Maintainers of open source projects need to carefully consider the development of the project to choose whether to join or enter a certain field.

set a vision

Articles are written for occasions, and codes are written for events. Open source projects must be able to solve practical problems, otherwise a reliable open source community cannot be formed.