Open Source – Pros and Cons of Putting Unfinished Projects on GitHub

githubopen source

I'm stating to work on a project that I intend to release as open source via the githubs. What are the advantages of putting the code on github from the outset, as opposed to waiting until the project is in a working state before publishing.

If it matters, this particular project is a C# app/service, and I have only a free github account (so I can't make it private and then pull back the covers later)

Best Answer

The quicker you make your code publicly available, the quicker you can gain feedback and people to help you. If your intention is to make the project open source from the beginning, then I would recommend starting your project out as public by default.

Github is full of small and unfinished projects so your project should fit right in. The more details you put in the readme file the better as it will help other developers/consumers get up to speed on your project quickly.

At the very least, your private projects should be under some sort of version control. If you don't want to pay for a service, then I'd recommend using Dropbox to back up your private local repositories. This way you have file backup and version control on your project which will save you from hours of pain in the future. More recently, GitHub and its competitors have released free private repositories, so you can use your version control solution of choice privately without a paid subscription.

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