mdlbear: (iLuminati)
Red Hat Magazine | Building a community around your open source project
There are a vast number of fantastic open source projects out there, though for every one that is widely adopted, there are many that remain cloaked in relative obscurity. How can the open source development model best be leveraged to take advantage of community feedback, ideas, and testing, and ultimately gather code contributions? If you are just thinking about open sourcing a new project, what steps can you take to ensure a vibrant community? If you already have an open source project, how can you make your community more active? The community can make any project stronger, but they are not built automatically.
(Via Linux Weekly News. Comments also pointed to a book on Producing Open Source Software (available free (cc-at-sa) from its website; reviewed here). I'll get back to that when I have time.)

The broad outlines of a possible open source project are starting to come together in my mind, somewhere in the vicinity of my CD-production tools, the website management tools, and the (still hypothetical) distributed blogging stuff. The encrypted off-site backup scheme may be separate; hard to tell at this point. More on that later.
mdlbear: portrait of me holding a guitar, by Kelly Freas (freas)

There need to be at least two versions of the PenguinSong distribution:

  • Album -- a stripped-down version suitable for use on a CD with a sizeable number of songs in the form of CD-audio tracks. This would be something like Lamppix Mini, which comes up in a self-contained kiosk mode both serving and viewing (in Firefox) a set of web pages.
  • Single -- a more complete version for a "super single" CD, holding a small number of songs plus a reasonably complete set of tools for recording, remixing, and so on. It also wants tools for uploading project files and remixes to PenguinSong.net.

There's not much point in having a full "workstation" distribution, since anyone who wants a hard-disk based music workstation could, and should, simply install DeMuDi. There will have to be a set of Debian packages for installing the scripts that make it easy to construct and burn a PenguinSong-based CD.

As mentioned above, PenguinSong.net becomes the community site for people collaborating on and redistributing PS-based albums and singles. (Hopefully there will be such a community. Luckily it seems to be easier to build a community around a cool set of tools than around some wishful thinking about a potential business model.)

mdlbear: portrait of me holding a guitar, by Kelly Freas (freas)

So, I have these domains: PenguinSong.{net,org,com}. The original idea was that .net would be a music-distribution community, sort of a co-op version of mp3.com, and the .org site would be the development support site. Needless to say, the idea didn't get very far -- I renewed the domains this month a little before their 5-year anniversary, and there's still no content. No surprise: I'm lazy.

But I was thinking about my "super single" live CD idea, and looking at various small distributions mostly based on Damn Small Linux. And it occurred to me that there really isn't a suitable set of small audio distributions. GeeXboX and the MoviX family are in that direction, but they're purely for playing, and more for video than audio.

Besides, PenguinSong makes sense as the name of a music-oriented Linux distro. More later.

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