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Wednesday, August 03, 2005 17:25 // Protland, Oregon, US // href
by David Heinemeier Hansen
Rails is a Ruby based Webapp framework that came out of the development of Basecamp. Basecamp is a commercial Web based project management software written by (www.37signals.com ...)
Davids idea when designing rails was to pull out the good ideas from other languages and platforms into a context adapted to small resources available to David at 37signals (0.25 programmers and 1 designer).
Instead of designing the framework before writing Basecamp, David decided to write Rails by creating a method of extracting the framework from Basecamp. So instead of making assumptions about what he would need in the future, he writes Rails in parallel with Basecamp. He calls this application driven development.
How to be successful with an OpenSource project:
Be visible. If no one cares for your OOS project you could as well not "opensource" it, since the cost for publishing will never be recovered.
Release only once the culture of the project is fairly set, so that new influences through new users will not bend the project out of shape. Make sure you can handle the contributions and bug reports from your users.
Increase your visibility by taking on the 'leader-of-the-pack' be careful about aggressiveness though, since if you are aggressive towards others, you will also attract aggressive people to your project.
Content © by Tobias Oetiker