With my limited experience in the open source world I must say that I was impress on how the open source projects created communities from nowhere, people willing to help, either sharing ideas or code, everybody working on a common goal, getting a nice product that solves the problem at hand. This is exactly what I want, share my passion to solve problems, the idea was good, everyone that I spoke to shared the same view, that NoSQL looked like a great idea, but the lack of transactions was something that is hard to trade, doing this on my own could be near to impossible, with my limited time and resources, also after so many years of using open source tools it was reasonable to jump in a put the code open source, so everyone will benefit from this new idea and I will bring balance to the world.
When I started the code I decided to keep it close until it was more mature, then someone pointed that as a bad idea:
KuntharAugust 22, 2012 at 9:21 AM
No source code on Github? Only drivers?
Good move. Bye bye djondb.
Good move. Bye bye djondb.
So I thought, yes, Kunthar is right, I'm planning to open source the code anyway, so why not now? and started the preparation, prepare makefiles to make easier the compilation by others, prepare scripts, documentation, etc... that took several weeks, even more than some of the code components I've made for the project, but the idea worth it.
The summary of this journey as open source project was firstly pointed here: http://crosstantine.blogspot.com.es/2013/03/balance-after-5-months-of-releasing.html in 2013, exactly 2 years ago, even that I was disappoint with this already, several people pointed the failures of my endeavor, their arguments:
- The documentation needs improvement
- You need to promote your database more
- Reporting issues is not easy, this could be improved.
The cruel reality is that users are too busy to report issues, the only one that will be a good tester is yourself, developers are too busy to get engage unless they see a money reward on this, (I got several emails saying they wanted to be partners on this, but at the end none of them had the experience or the time to really spend on this).
After 4 years of having this project in github I've produced 911 commits, the project is ranked among the 30% projects in github with more commits, even that I'm just 1 developer, from that... only 2 issues were reported and no one ever sent a pull request or patches,
So what I got from this experience? not too much, just a new experience and a bunch of biased conclusions:
- If you don't have a stable product don't go to open source
- People is willing to get involved if the product has created a name on its own.
- Use your product yourself, don't wait for others to test it.
- Don't waste time creating cross-platform compilation tools, etc. if the product got traction in one platform others will be willing to help with these things to compile it in their own platform.
- Don't listen to others unless they have a proven history of success in the field you are trying to get into.
Some of these may sound very obvious to others, but they were not for me, and I'd to learn it in the hard way.
One of the few wise decisions I made was to hold the copyright of the code, otherwise I will be screwed, and after 4 years of work, with no help at all, I will need to forget this product, I'm glad that I read that from MySQL and others.
