What questions do you have about participating in open source?

ideas.md

Are you new to open source? What sort of questions, concerns, or even fears do you have?

Culture

• How do I start contributing to other projects?
• How can I encourage contribution to my project?
• Who should have commit rights?
• What commitment am I making by opening my source?
• How do I establish a community?
• What expectations will the community have?
• How do I communicate with the community?
• What are some models of governance for an OSS project?
• How do I say 'no' without alienating potential allies?
• What if someone forks my project?
• How do I build trust with contributors? with the community?
• How can I get serious contributors to my project?

Workflow

• How do people collaborate in the OSS world?
• What’s a pull request?
• What’s a fork?
• How do I use branches?
• Is there a benefit to these models outside of OSS?
• How do I manage backlog, vision, roadmap?
• What should I expect when sending my very first pull request?
• What should I expect when receiving my very first pull request?

Licensing

• How do I choose a license?
• Can I use something with license X?
• What is a CLA and why do I need to sign one?
• When a consumer of my project has concerns about the terms of the license, what should I do? (since I'm not a lawyer)

Business

• How do I (or even should I) monetize my oss project?
• What implications does dual licensing have for business?
• Can I build a business around someone else's open project?

Misc

• Do we need open source? / What's the use of open source?
• How open source be applied to artifacts other than code? Content, hardware design, etc?
• How can I measure the success of my project?
• Provided some money flows in, how should it be dealt with with regards to contributors?
• Should I create a new competing project or contribute to an existing one?
• What's the difference between a simple code drop and a full community project?
• reporting a bug vs a pull request with a failing test.
• How do I find the "right" project to contribute to?

Tools

• community centers e.g. GitHub, CodePlex
• git clients
• collaboration tools, persistent chat
• Issue tracker, Blog post, Twitter, StackOverflow, Google group, mailing list -- What channel for which purpose?
• continuous integration solutions - teamcity.codebetter.com, travisci.org, appveyor, etc?

From the consumer perspective:

• What are the risks to rely on an open source project? What should one ponder/take into account in order to minimize those risks?

Can I make money as an open source software developer?