Business Success with Open Source

Styles of Project Releases

As you’ll see in Chapter 20, ​Releasing FOSS Projects​, the basic steps to release a project are more or less the same regardless of what you’re releasing. Those steps may differ in scope, and there may be more or fewer details to sort out, but the steps themselves don’t change too much. The difference in project release style comes in what you do after the project is out in the world. You’ll find many different styles, depending on how you decide to approach follow-up after releasing, but these are the four most common.

Throw It Over the Wall

When someone releases a project with no intentions or plans for engaging with it afterward, we say they threw it over the wall. The project is publicly available under a free ...