Deacon: Musings on Starting an Open-Source Project

Jul 26, 2010, 19:07 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Dave Rea)

[ Thanks to Dave for this link. ]

"I've been using open-source software since the late-nineties – I can still remember the intrigued excitement I felt when my friend Seth first told me about a free system called "Linux", and showed me the LRP box humming along in his attic. In April, nearly two college degrees, countless thousands of lines of code, and over a decade later, I felt that same excitement when I decided to launch my own open-source project. "Deacon" (short for Droid+Beacon) was on its way to becoming a library for Android developers who wished to add push-notification capability to their Android applications. The Deacon library would avoid requiring the use of any third-party server for push delivery, affording complete autonomy for app developers – and embodying the spirit of freedom and choice that the Android platform represents.

"In my years as a member of the free software community, I've seen plenty of projects come and go, and even witnessed the rise and fall of an empire or two (yes, Gentoo was my daily-driver for a while). But I never really considered just what the creation of a community around a piece of software would entail. As I tend to do, I oversimplified the concept..."

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