GeezerVison

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it with relevant information.

Open source also known as free software, OSS or FLOSS in the IndieWeb refers to both a set of projects where community members share their creations (often, but not limited to software) in a way that allows for collaboration, and an imperative from our principles encouraging public sharing of code, designs, and content for re-use by others in and beyond the community.

Why

Open sourcing at least part of your IndieWeb project is a great way to enable & encourage asynchronous feedback from the rest of the community.

Your code may be useful as a reference for others who are implementing similar functionality or standards support.

By separating at least some of your code into an open source library, you may provide a building block that many other developers can use to more rapidly implement similar applications or features.

How to

How to open source a project

Before you open source a project, you should make sure that any proprietary (non-open source) code that you would like to keep to yourself is separate from the code you open source. You should also:

• Choose a license for your code
• Remove any sensitive information
• Write a README that explains your project and how it works

Ideally you should open source your code on your own site, and share it where others may easily re-use it. This could mean anything from offering an compressed archive (such as a zip file) of source code on your own site to hosting your own software forge.

How to encourage contributions

If you would like others to contribute to your project, consider adding a CONTRIBUTING file that outlines how people can add bugfixes and new features to your project, and a CODE_OF_CONDUCT file that outlines the social and behavioral expectations around your project.

Many IndieWeb community members publish open source projects on GitHub. GitHub has wide adoption in the developer community and an extensive range of interactive, intuitive tools that you can use to collaborate on projects together.

Open for contributions

There are many open-source IndieWeb projects which encourage and support contributions. You can find more projects that may be open to contributions in the following locations.

• IndieWeb GitHub organization
• Microformats GitHub organization
• IndieWeb Hackathon hosts
• Category:Projects that need maintenance
• Projects on language specific pages
  • Go
  • Javascript / Node.js
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby

Community Members Writing Open Source Code

Community members who publish open source code that relates to the IndieWeb (alphabetical by full name)

• Aaron Parecki
• capjamesg
• Mark Sutherland
• Dr. Matt Lee
• Paul Robert Lloyd
• Ryan Barrett
• Tantek Çelik
• Tom Morris
• Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

Participating in IndieWeb Standard Development

Members of the IndieWeb community have contributed to, written, and edited various standards. If you implement a standard on your site and want to get involved with it, you can do so by open sourcing your code, writing about your implementation, and/or sharing your thoughts about the standard and what it allows you to do.

The IndieWeb community maintains an IndieWeb GitHub account where you can file feature requests and issues that relate to standards. Sharing your ideas about how a standard can be improved will aid its development even if the standard is mature. Our community standards, including those that are stable, all benefit from hearing developers' experience implementing them. Sharing your thoughts will help the community figure out how standards can be improved.

See Also

• principles
• Projects
• JavaScript
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• freedom

• IndieWeb principles
• stubs
• open source