u/BootcampBen wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
This is pretty unrelated to bootcamps - BUT: Do you have any tips for getting an open source project started? I have an idea that I want to work on but it is serving a small but passionate community (the flight sim community). It seems like step one is to make an MVP of
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Starting a real open source project is honestly really hard. Almost all of the biggest ones were either made by large corporations, or have employees of large corporations as the primary contributors. It's vastly different from what it looks like at first glance.
Otherwise, the people who start new projects are generally very experienced engineers and they have a reason to do so, and they are doing them under a company name.
For example Apollo, Dagster... even Material UI for React. So the Material spec is a DESIGN spec from Google. Material UI is a React library implementing that spec inside React. 1. It's a for-profit company. 2. The founding team is experience engineers.
A real open source project is in many ways HARDER than building software for a company, because you have to have clearer code architecture built from the beginning with the intention of people working on top of this codebase from all over the world. At Facebook, it took months to take a non-open source project and prepare it to release as open source because of the refactoring needed.
Surprisingly a lot of open source projects are run by profit companies OR have paid employees working on the, and this is why the OSP representation is dangerous... just saying "this is open source" doesn't mean it was an unpaid/not real work experience.... for may people it's still paid work experience.
Anyways I've been talking all the time recently about open source and have been blocked and called a "borderline stalker" by a Codesmith employee, so I'll stop ranting here lol because I don't think some people want me talking about this and I have other things to do.
Now back to trying to be helpful. For your OSP I would just build it as a project, not trying to build an open source project (even though you will release it publicly). I would build whatever you want to build and try to find some other people there who are extremely passionate as well about flight sim. Two paths you can go down are 1. building something for FlightGear, 2. simplifying a bit and maybe building something related to maps and navigation - which is a more general problem... like working with [https://www.openstreetmap.org/](https://www.openstreetmap.org/) in some way.