Reddit reviews Producing Open Source Software: How To Run A Successful Free Software Project

Somebody famous in the software development industry once said:
"The quality of a software product is directly proportional to the process used to develop it."
I think it may have been Gerald Weinberg. ICBW.
In any case, I believe this to be true.

Want to know more?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model
The CMM is a very heavyweight model. Big organizations, big projects.

http://producingoss.com/
Fogel, "Producing Open Source Software" is an excellent tutorial for setting up Open Source Software Development. The process scales well for shops of a few to larger projects. When using Agile methods (SCRUM for example) there are methods for "SCRUMs of SCRUMs" that scale into very large projects.
Have a look at the online book and buy Fogel's book it it suits you. Fogel has to eat too.
https://www.amazon.com/Producing-Open-Source-Software-Successful/dp/0596007590

The easiest way to get into open source is find a project you actually use and take a look through the source code. So many projects could use more/better documentation and eventually someone will take notice if you start making additions. Once you're comfortable with the code you can start making commits but be sure to do your best to try to stay true to the current code paradigms and style.

As for doing a personal project the best way is to figure out something you want to learn more about or making a program that somehow improves your life. The important part is to find something you can be passionate about for an indefinite amount of time. If you get bored with it you're not going to want to work on it.

Want to learn more about databases? Make a program that utilizes a sql flavor of some kind. What to learn more about sockets? Make an http server. Etc. etc.

This book was a wealth of knowledge in regards to doing open source http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0596007590

That's a good way to do it. And I'm sorry for that guy who said about banning - it's an assholly thing to do. As you can see in the other thread, a lot of people (if not the most) argued with him.

Getting whitepaper ready is a good first step. What you can also do is check out some books about software design. The most important ones I'd say are:

https://gettingreal.37signals.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Anniversary-Software-Engineering-ebook/dp/B00B8USS14/

http://www.amazon.com/Producing-Open-Source-Software-Successful/dp/0596007590/

There are also essays by Paul Graham (google who he is if you don't know), especially this one:

http://paulgraham.com/start.html

As for publishing the whitepaper - by all means go for it. If you don't want to share it publicly at first, you can send it to selected members of community, or to people who you noticed that are quite sensible within the community.

As for the NDA-s, and non-competes, I guess people explained to you that nobody will do these kinds of things. That is because inexperienced people often have very basic ideas, and nobody wants to then be tied down and exposed to lawsuit because of it.

Imagine that you sign an nda or a non-compete as an architect, and you discover that the guy's brilliant idea is for a building with just round windows. It's really not that novel, and you'd then have to explain to the guy why it isn't that novel. And be exposed to lawsuits for years to come, whenever you make round windows.

Somehow, nobody has these kinds of ideas with architecture, but every other day someone comes to software people with something like this.

Finally, when it comes to holding back your idea... Sometimes (very rarely) it is beneficial, but most of the times it's not. I remember the people working on the first web email system - hotmail.com. These guys were secret as fuck, afraid of someone beating them to the market. But on the other hand, they were already experienced in building systems, and had a team built and a budget.

There's a chance somebody else has an exact same idea, and they are working on it at the same time as you do. And the thing is - the more relaxed they are about sharing the idea, the faster they will go. And also - if anyone ever decides to "steal" your idea once you publish it, you'll be way ahead of them. Because by the time they see your idea, you'll be already way ahead of them in terms of gaining support for your own.

Good luck!

Thank you for all the advice! I'm interested in the books that you suggested - I've been building a queue of books to read to help me learn, but most of those are "textbook-y". The one exception is a book I found called Producing Open Source Software, which I heard is good for people looking to join open source projects. I'm trying to find some other books to look at that are "less academic" as well so that I can learn more about programming aside from the fundamentals that I need.

Thank you for the advice about writing code daily. Right now I'm working as a quasi-intern for a freelance iOS developer in my area who is really good teaching people the mechanics of the language on weekends, but during the week I'm not as industrious (I usually work with him for a total of 6-8 hours on Sat/Sun).

Ultimately I want to work for a company like SpaceX or Scaled Composites, so I definitely need to learn languages such as C++ or similar... however, most of what I do right now (aside from iOS) is just HTML/CSS. Is there a benefit to trying to find an open source project to hop in on that is written in C++ (again, or similar) or is this something where any open source project is better than none?

I suppose it's worth mentioning that I started teaching myself Python, I let some of that fall to the wayside because of coursework and I needed the extra time for that, but now that the semester is over I think I could start that up again. I've actually been trying to write a small command line game with it :)