Open source projects have an increasing importance on modern software development. For this reason, these projects, as usual with commercial software projects, should make use of promotion channels to communicate and establish contact with users and contributors. In this article, we study the channels used to promote a set of 100 popular GitHub projects. First, we reveal that Twitter, user meetings, and blogs are the most common promotion channels used by the studied projects. Second, we report a major difference between the studied projects and a random sample of projects, regarding the use of the investigated promotion channels. Third, we show the importance of a popular news aggregation site (Hacker News) on the promotion of open source. We conclude by presenting a set of practical recommendation to open source project managers and leaders, regarding the promotion of their projects.
翻译:开放源码项目在现代软件开发方面日益重要,因此,这些项目与商业软件项目一样,应该利用推广渠道与用户和捐助者进行沟通和建立联系,在本篇文章中,我们研究了用来促进100个受欢迎的GitHub项目的渠道。首先,我们透露,Twitter、用户会议和博客是所研究项目最常用的促进渠道。第二,我们报告了所研究的项目与随机抽样项目在使用所调查的促销渠道方面存在的重大差异。第三,我们展示了大众新闻集成网站(Hacker News)在促进开放源码方面的重要性。最后,我们向公开源码项目管理员和领导人提出了一套关于促进项目的实际建议。