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I recently contributed some code to an open source library/tool just before I realized that I'd like to re-write this project myself (different programming language and design choices). However, some aspects of the project are just like I would have done them myself or are simply worth "copying". Even if I tried really hard to forget about the original code -- most class names, constants and other stuff just are naturally named the same. The original project's license is AGPL.
Can I use a different license (e.g. MIT)? Which ones?
Will I have to mention the original project somewhere?
If so, where? And will I ever be allowed to remove the notice (maybe after the two projects have truly diverged after a few years of development)?
I am not a lawyer and this is probably not the correct venue for soliciting legal advice.
However, this is my take, as one FOSS contributor to another.
Generally speaking when you contribute to open source projects, you retain the copyright over the code that you wrote, and you release it under a license that permits everyone to use modify and distribute it.
Thus, you retain the right to relicense code that you so contributed under MIT or another license. That doesn't count as "stealing" the code and erasing the GPL license -- you were the original source and you retain the right to release what was originally yours again under a different license.
In some projects, the leaders may request that people DO transfer copyright, although its pretty rare I think. You should check the licensing statement to be sure. Unless there is something in writing somewhere saying that you explicitly agree to transfer copyright to them, then most likely you retained it.
You do not have the right to relicense other peoples work though. In cases where you modified someone elses code, contributing some changes to their class or something, you probably become joint owners, and at least I would not feel comfortable copying the part that they made and relicensing it without permission.
That's just the text of the code though. If you want to rewrite another program from scratch, using a similar high level plan but different execution, I don't think copyright will encumber you. Intellectual property law can still encumber you if some technique or method in the code is covered by a software patent. But it doesn't sound like that's the case here.
To avoid legal issues, sometimes companies / groups of people will use "clean room design" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design). But iiuc this is just done as a precaution to unambiguously head off any possible lawsuit -- the law does not require that you use such techniques just because you once looked at GPL code, iiuc.
For an example of this playing out, you can look at the history of the MinGW cross compiler project, and the mingw-w64 spin-off of it, which originally began because a private company wanted a version of mingw which supported 64-bit processors and other things, and so used clean room design to reverse engineer the project. The result of this was eventually made fully open source, but was not accepted back into the original mingw project and so there are now two projects. (Hope that this is a fair and impartial summary of the history.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinGW#History
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How to successfully implement democratic (non-BDFL controlled) type of management for the open source project?
More specifically - for the project using distributed source repositories.
What style of communication is best to adopt in such environment?
How to encourage merging branches into the master?
I am mostly interested in establishing the situation where people can directly merge into the master branch under the "social contract" agreement that they follow the project roadmap (which they themselves help to define) and that code they commit is tested.
I specifically want to encourage workflow
define the problem->define requirements and specific metrics of success->architect->build and test
The reason is that - I often see emails like here is the problem and here is how I think it should be solved
Immediately somebody else jumps in and starts a fight.
Not productive at all.
Often disagreement of that kind stems from not being on the same page on the problem definition, requirements or architecture. Or sometimes just because nobody even thought about such things.
How to encourage people to analyze the problem properly, share great ideas and select the best solutions?
How to organize communication so to avoid silly fights, make good decisions without being overly bureaucratic and move along at a good pace ?
Would you have any suggestions? Are there examples of projects managed this way?
How do you think adoption of distributed revision control instead of centralized affects the style of project management?
edit: found some interesting links in related questions
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
Sorry for this somewhat off-topic answer (i.e. one not addressing directly the question). Please edit at your heart's delight!
Projects _do_ need executive governance!
Such may come from a single Benevolent (or not) Dictator, or a [IMHO, small] group, possibly open, of diverse but like-minded individuals. A standard joke on this is that: "The group should be made of an odd number of members, and 3 is already too many"; in truth, small collegial committees can be very effective.
This requirement for a "non fully democratic" decision making entity is however somewhat aligned with the processes suggested in the question. To effectively harness the good will of contributors to the project, the executive team needs to
be perceived as legitimate
communicate effectively
empower "the masses" to contribute with roadmap definition, problem identification, solution scoping and all other design-level tasks. (All the while it remaining clear that in the end, and after all has been said, final decision will be done in committee.
DELIVER a good and vibrant product (BTW by adopting agile development processes, the time between deliveries is lessened)
compromise when needed
advocate the interest of pooling resources in a coordinated fashion, rather than branching out.
Share the glory!
To support all of this formal documentation and processes are very useful. For example, the define the problem->define requirements and specific metrics of success->architect->build procedure indicated in the question can be implemented in the form a single collaboratively edited document (wiki-based or other), i.e. one per issue/idea. This document is templated with a defined format: required attributes such as date, initial posting info... and sections which are opened (and closed) for editing following a given schedule. This allows keeping a clean(er) record of the way the collective though of a given issue, what was suggested etc, what was [authoritatively] decided and why.
With such a process, the community feels engaged and hopefully individuals not too disappointed when the eventual decisions do not go "their" way. They can read and comment on the what and why of the decisions.
Another useful approach is to reward effective participation by informally (or factually) provide more weight to the contributors who effectively help with the project. The more active members can either gain their way into the "inner circle" or be handed-out leadership roles on subsets of the project.
Finally, the leaders of a project (whether in the context of a "democratic" or of a "partially dicatorial" leadership) need to be ever vigilant about "peace keeping". Contributors to Open Source projects are typically energetic, smart and opinionated individuals; conflict of opinion, conflict of personalities, impatience etc. is to be expected. These clashes however can be eased by systematically addressing issues with clear facts, moderating/editing aggressively against name calling and non-productive forms etc.
Originally posted on MetaOptimize.
Constitution for Governance of Open-Source Projects (v20100227)
Let it be affirmed that the primary goal in instituting governance of an open-source project be to ensure the long-term health of the project.
Accordingly, the default bias should be towards openness and inclusiveness.
However, policy should be changed as issues present themselves, in order to maintain the long-term health of the project.
For the model of decision making, we favor a "do-ocracy".
The people who contribute the most generally command the respect of the community.
Alienating them is the best way to derail the project.
The repository should be open the committers, given that commits can easily be reverted and commit-access easily revoked. This is preferable to alienating potential committers.
To ensure transparency for developers new and old, and allow them to decide their involvement in a project based upon the history of the project, their should be transparency and openess in the inner working of the project. For example, the email archive should be public.
Lastly, let us remember that too much red-tape gets in the way of progress. So red-tape and other barriers to contribution should be avoided, and only added as issues present themselves.
This Constitution can and should be amended as issues present themselves.
Therefore be it resolved.
access to repository
there are several options ranging from one controlling committer to anyone can commit - but upon social agreement that they respect the project guidelines and the roadmap.
in my opinion distributed repository allows you to be more relaxed with who you allow to commit, because there are multiple backups and the repo becomes virtually unbreakable.
on a separate note - anyone can commit approach - which I would like to test out - sounds more like a "wiki". I can directly compare this with my experience managing a wiki (nmrwiki.org): where despite complete openness - where not even user registration is required to edit the resource, people are often wary about "breaking stuff" and this worry becomes a mental barrier to making a contribution. So a permissive approach to repository management may just work.
Communication style:
email and mailing lists:
discuss everything concerning the project in public (?)
when asking questions - do not bundle
questions with your own opinions
encourage people to propose more than one solution
ask people to weigh pros and cons
be brief and to the point
avoid frivolous language that can be perceived negatively with people that do not know you well
I have 3 questions :
What is CodeCoverage ?
What is it good for ?
What tools are used for
analyzing Code Coverage ?
You can get very good information from SO WEB SITE
Free code coverage tools
What is Code Coverage and how do YOU measure it?
Code Coverage is a measurement of how many lines/blocks/arcs of your code are executed while the automated tests are running.CC is collected by using a specialized tool to instrument the binaries to add tracing calls and run a full set of automated tests against the instrumented product. A good CC tools will give you not only the percentage of the code that is executed, but also will allow you to drill into the data and see exactly which lines of code were executed during particular test.
Code coverage algorithms were first created to address the problem of assessing a source code by looking directly at the source code. Code coverage belongs to the structural testing category because of the assertions made on the internal parts of the program and not on system outputs. Therefore code coverage aims at finding parts of the code that are not worth testing.
http://www.stickyminds.com/sitewide.asp?Function=edetail&ObjectType=ART&ObjectId=7580
alt text http://www.codecoveragetools.com/images/stories/software_lifecycle.jpg
Its Good for
Functional coverage aiming at finding how many functions or procedures were executed.
Statement or line coverage which identifies the number of lines in the source code has been executed.
Condition coverage or decision coverage answers the question about the number of loop conditions were executed in the program.
Path coverage which focuses on finding all possible paths from a given starting point in the code has been executed.
Entry and exit coverage which finds how many functions (C/C++, Java) or procedures (Pascal) were executing from the beginning to the end.
TOOLS
http://www.codecoveragetools.com/
http://java-source.net/open-source/code-coverage
http://www.codecoveragetools.com/index.php/coverage-process/code-coverage-tools-java.html
http://open-tube.com/10-code-coverage-tools-c-c/
http://csharp-source.net/open-source/code-coverage
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3190
From wikipedia article
Code coverage is a measure used in
software testing. It describes the
degree to which the source code of a
program has been tested. It is a form
of testing that inspects the code
directly and is therefore a form of
white box testing1. Currently, the
use of code coverage is extended to
the field of digital hardware, the
contemporary design methodology of
which relies on Hardware description
languages (HDLs).
Advocating the use of code coverage
A code coverage tool simply keeps
track of which parts of your code get
executed and which parts do not.
Usually, the results are granular down
to the level of each line of code. So
in a typical situation, you launch
your application with a code coverage
tool configured to monitor it. When
you exit the application, the tool
will produce a code coverage report
which shows which lines of code were
executed and which ones were not. If
you count the total number of lines
which were executed and divide by the
total number of lines which could have
been executed, you get a percentage.
If you believe in code coverage, the
higher the percentage, the better. In
practice, reaching 100% is extremely
rare.
The use of a code coverage tool is
usually combined with the use of some
kind of automated test suite. Without
automated testing, a code coverage
tool merely tells you which features a
human user remembered to use. Such a
tool is far more useful when it is
measuring how complete your test suite
is with respect to the code you have
written.
Related articles
The Future of Code-Coverage Tools
The effectiveness of code coverage tools in software testing
Tools
Open Source Code Coverage Tools in Java
Code coverage is a metric, showing how "well" the source code is tested. There are several types of code coverage: line coverage, function coverage, branch coverage.
In order to measure the coverage, you shall run the application either manually or by automated test.
Tools can be divided in two categories:
- the ones that run the compiled code in a modified environment (like the debugger), counting the required points (functions, lines, etc.);
- the ones that require special compilation - in this case the resulting binary already contains the code which actually does the counting.
There are several tools for measuring and visualizing the result, they depend from platform, from source code's language.
Please read article on Wikipedia
To provide you tools, please define for which OS and language do you use.
Code coverage is a measure used in software testing. It describes the degree to which the source code of a program has been tested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_coverage
The wikipedia definition is pretty good, but in my own words code coverage tells you how much automated testing you have accounted for. 100% would mean that ever single line of code in your application is being covered by a unit test.
NCover is an application for .NET
The term refers to how well your program is covered by your tests. See the following wikipedia article for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_coverage
The other answers already cover what Code Coverage is. The think I'd like to stress is that you need to be careful not to treat high coverage as implicitly meaning you've tested all scenarios. It doesn't necessarily say how well you've tested the code or the quality of your tests, just that you've hit a certain percentage of code as part of the tests running.
High Code Coverage does not necessarily mean High Test Quality, but High Test Quality does mean High Code Coverage
In practice, I usually aim for 90-95% code coverage which is often achievable. The last few % are often too expensive to be worth trying to hit.
There are many ways to develop applications. One of those is "Extreme Programming" or "Test Driven Design (TDD)". It states that all code should be tested. Code Coverage is a means of measuring how much is tested.
I'd like to make a small remark about this: I don't think all code should be tested, nor that one should set a specific percentage of code coverage. Neither do I think that code shouldn't be tested with Unit Tests (code testing code). I do think one should decide what makes sense to test. Due to this reason I generally don't use code coverage.
One thing that some tools provide, is highlight the parts that are tested. This way you might run into some code that isn't tested but actually should be, which is the only thing I use it for.
Good answers.
My two cents is that there is no method of testing that catches all errors, but less testing will never catch more errors, so any testing is good. To my mind, coverage testing is not to show what code has been exercised, but to show what code has not been exercised, because that is where bugs love to lurk.
If you combine it with single-stepping, it is a very good way to review code and catch bugs. Here's an example.
Another useful tool for ensuring code quality(which encompasses code coverage) that I recently used is Sonar.
Here is the link http://www.sonarqube.org/
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Why should I do Nightly Builds?
You should do nightly builds to ensure that your codebase stays healthy.
A side effect of doing nightly builds is that it forces the team to create and maintain a fully automated build script. This helps to ensure that your build process is documented and repeatable.
Automated builds are good at finding the following problems:
Somebody checked in something that breaks stuff.
Somebody forgot to check in a necessary file or change.
Your build scripts no longer work.
Your build machine is broken.
Doing this nightly ensures that you catch such problems within 24 hours of when they occur. That is preferable to finding all the problems 24 hours before you are supposed to deliver the software.
You should also, of course, have automated unit tests that are run for each nightly build.
I've personally found continuous integration to be better than nightly builds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
I even use it on one man projects, it's amazing how fast you can expose issues and take care of them right there.
I've been doing build engineering (among other things) for 16 years. I am a strong believer in build-early, build-often, continuous integration. So the first thing I do with a project is establish how it will be built (Java: Ant or Maven; .NET: NAnt or MSBuild) and how it will be managed (Subversion or some other version control). Then I'll add Continuous Integration (CruiseControl or CruiseControl.NET) depending upon the platform, then let the other developers loose.
As the project grows, and the need for reports and documentation grows, eventually the builds will take longer to run. At that point I'll split the builds into continuous builds (run on checkin) that only compile and run unit tests and daily builds that build everything, run all the reports, and build any generated documentation. I may also add a delivery build that tags the repository and does any additional packaging for a customer delivery. I'll use fine-grained build targets to manage the details, so that any developer can build any part of the system -- the Continuous Integration server use the exact same build steps as any developer. Most importantly, we never deliver a build for testing or a customer that wasn't built using the build server.
That's what I do -- here's why I do it (and why you should too):
Suppose you have a typical application, with multiple projects and several developers. While the developers may start with a common, consistent development environment (same OS, same patches, same tools, same compilers), over the course of time their environments will diverge. Some developers will religiously apply all security patches and upgrades, others won't. Some developers will add new (maybe better) tools, others won't. Some will remember to update their complete workspace before building; others will only update the part of the project they're developing. Some developers will add source code and data files to the project, but forget to add them to source control. Others will write unit tests that depend upon specific quirks of their environment. As a consequence, you'll quickly see the ever-popular "Well, it builds/works on my machine" excuses.
By having a separate, stable, consistent, known-good server for building your application, you'll easily discover these sorts of problems, and by running builds from every commit, you'll be able to pinpoint when a problem crept into the system. Even more importantly, because you use a separate server for building and packaging your application, it will always package everything the same way, every time. There is nothing worse than having a developer ship a custom build to a customer, have it work, and then have no idea how to reproduce the customizations.
When I saw this question, first I searched for Joel Spolsky's answer. Bit disappointed, so I planned to add it here.
Hope everyone is aware of Joel Test on Careers.
From his blog on The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
3. Do you make daily builds?
When you're using source control, sometimes one programmer
accidentally checks in something that breaks the build. For example,
they've added a new source file, and everything compiles fine on their
machine, but they forgot to add the source file to the code
repository. So they lock their machine and go home, oblivious and
happy. But nobody else can work, so they have to go home too, unhappy.
Breaking the build is so bad (and so common) that it helps to make
daily builds, to insure that no breakage goes unnoticed. On large
teams, one good way to insure that breakages are fixed right away is
to do the daily build every afternoon at, say, lunchtime. Everyone
does as many checkins as possible before lunch. When they come back,
the build is done. If it worked, great! Everybody checks out the
latest version of the source and goes on working. If the build failed,
you fix it, but everybody can keep on working with the pre-build,
unbroken version of the source.
On the Excel team we had a rule that whoever broke the build, as their
"punishment", was responsible for babysitting the builds until someone
else broke it. This was a good incentive not to break the build, and a
good way to rotate everyone through the build process so that everyone
learned how it worked.
Though I haven't got an opportunity to make daily builds, I'm a great fan of it.
Still not convinced? Check out the brief here in Daily Builds Are Your Friend!!
You don't actually, what you should be wanting is Continuous Integration and automatic testing (which is a step further than nightly builds).
If you are in any doubt you should read this article by Martin Fowler about Continuous Integration.
To summarize, you want to build and test as early and often as possible to spot errors immediately so they can be fixed while what you were trying to achieve when you caused them is still fresh in your mind.
I'd actually recommend to do builds every time you check in. In other words, I'd recommend setting up a Continuous Integration system.
The advantages of such a system and other details can be found in Fowler's article and on the Wikipedia entry among other places.
In my personal experience, it's a matter of Quality Control: every time code (or tests, which can be seen as a form of requirements) are modified, bugs might be creeping in. To ensure quality you should make a fresh build of the product as it would be shipped and perform all the tests available. The more often this is done, the less likely bugs will be allowed to form a colony. Therefore, daily (nightly) or continuous cycles are preferred.
In addition, whether you restrict access o your project to developers or a larger group of users, a nightly build enables everyone to be on the 'latest version', minimizing the pain of merging their own contributions back into the code.
You want to do builds on a regular schedule in order to catch problems with integration of code between developers. The reason you want to do this nightly, as opposed to weekly or on some longer schedule, is that the longer you wait to discover these kinds of problems, the more difficult it will be to resolve them. The practice of doing a build on every check in (Continuous Integration) is just taking the nightly build process to a logical extreme.
The side benefit of having a repeatable build process is important in the long run as well. If you work on a team where there are multiple projects going on, then at some point you will need to be able to easily recreate an old build, perhaps for creating a patch. :(
The more you can automate the build process, the more time you will save for each subsequent build. It also takes the build process itself off of the critical path of delivering the final product, which should make your manager happy. :)
It also depends on the size and structure of the team(s) working on your project. If there are different teams relying on each others API, it may make a lot of sense to have nightly builds for frequent integration. If you're hacking away with only one or two team mates it may or may not be worth it.
Depending on the complexity of your product continuous integration may or may not be able run a full test suite.
Imagine Cisco testing a router with the literally 1000s of different setups to test. To run a full test suite on some products takes time. Sometimes weeks. So you need builds for different purposes. A nightly build can be the basis for a more thorough test suite.
I think they are very important especially on projects with more than 1 person. The team needs to know ASAP if someone:
checks in a bad file
doesn't check in a file
...
Any build automation is better than no build automation :-)
Personally, I prefer daily builds - that way if the build doesn't work then everyone is around to get it fixed.
In fact, if at all possible then Continuous Integration builds are the way to go (i.e. a build on every check-in) as that minimizes the amount of change between a build and so makes it easy to tell who broke the build and also easy to fix the build.
Well ... I guess it depends a lot on your project, of course. If it's just your hobby project, with no releases, no dependencies, and noone but you submitting code, it might be overkill.
If, on the other hand, there's a team of developers all submitting code, automatic nightly builds will help you ensure the quality of the code in the repository. If someone does something that "breaks the build" for all others, it will quickly be noticed. It is possible to break the build without noticing, for instance by forgetting to add a new file to the repository, and nightly builds in a centralized location will detect these quite quickly.
There are of course other possible benefits, I'm sure others will supply them. :)
Nightly builds are only necessary for significantly large projects (when it takes too long to build it often throughout the day). If you have a small project that does not take long to build you can build it as you get functional pieces of code done so that you know that you did not mess anything up in the procees. However, with larger projects this is not possible so it is important to build the project just so that you know that everything is still in working order
There are several reasons, some will be more applicable than others
If your project is being worked on by two or more people
It's a good way to grab the latest version of code that you aren't working on
A nightly build provides a slice in time of the current state of the code
A nightly build will give you a stable build if you need to send code to people
Nightly builds aren't always necessary - I think they're only really useful on big projects. But if you're on a big project, a nightly build is a good way of checking that everything is working - you can run all your tests (unit tests, integration tests), build all your code - in short, verify that nothing is broken in your project.
If you've got a smaller project your build and test times will be shorter so you can probably afford to do more regular builds.
Nightly builds are ideal for performing static code analysis (see qalab and the projects it collects stats from if you are in java world). Unfortunately, this is something that's rarely done.
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We have a series of closed source applications and libraries, for which we think it would make sense opening up the source code.
What has been blocking us, so far, is the effort needed to clean up the code base and documenting the source before opening up.
We want to open up the source only if we have a reasonable chance of the projects being successful -- i.e. having contributors. We are convinced that the code would be interesting to a large base of developers.
Which factors, excluding the "interestingness" and "usefulness" of the project, determine the success of an open source project?
Examples:
Cleanliness of code
Availability of source code comments
Fully or partially documented APIs
Choice of license (GPL vs. LGPL vs. BSD, etc...)
Choice of public repository
Investment in a public website
There are a several things which dominate the successfulness of code. All of these must be achieved for the slightest chance of adoption.
Market - There must be a market for your open source project. If your project is a orange juicer in space, I doubt that you'll be very successful. You must make sure your project gets a large adoption amongst users and developers. It is twice as likely to succeed if you can get other corporations to adopt it as well.
Documentation - As you touched on earlier documentation is key. Amongst this documentation is commented code, architectural decisions, and API notes. Even if your documentation contains bugs, or bugs about your software it is ok. Remember, transparency is key.
Freedom - You must allow your code to be "free" - by this I mean free as in speech, not as in beer. If you have a feeling your market is being a library for other corporations a BSD license is optimal. If your piece of software is going to run on desktops then GPL is your choice.
Transparency - You must write software in a transparent environment. Once you go open source there is no hidden secrets. You must explain everything you do, and what you are doing. This will piss off developers like no other
Developer Community - A strong developer community is required. This must be existing. Only about 5% of users contribute back to the project. If someone notices there haven't been any releases for a year they wont think "Wow, this piece of software is done," they will think "developers must of dumped it." Keep your developers working on it, even if it means they are costing you money.
Communications - You must make sure you community is able to communicate. They must be able to file bugs, discuss workarounds, and publish patches. Without feedback, it is pointless to opensource the project
Availability - Making your code easy to get is necessary, even if it means pissing off lawyers. You have to make sure your project is easy to download, and utilize. You don't want the user to have to jump through 18 nag screens and sign a contract in order to do this. You have to make things simple, and clean
I think that the single most important factor is the number of users that are using your project.
Otherwise its just a really well written, usefull and well documented bunch of stuff that sits on a server not doing very much...
To acquire contributors, you first need users, then you need some incompleteness. You need to trigger the "This is cool, but I really wish it had this or was different in this way." If you are missing an obvious feature, it's extremely likely a user will become a contributor to add it.
The most important thing is that the program be good. If its not good, nobody will use it. You cannot hope that the chicken-and-egg will reverse and that people will take it for granted until it becomes good.
Of course, "good" merely means "better than any other practical option for a significant number of people," it doesn't mean that its strictly the best, only that it has some features that make it, for many people, better than other options. Sometimes the program has no equivalent anywhere else, in which case there's almost no requirement in this regard.
When a program is good, people will use it. Obviously, it has to have a market among users--a good program that does something nobody wants isn't really good no matter how well its designed. One could make a point about marketing, but truly good products, up to a point, have a tendency to market themselves. Its much harder to promote something that isn't good, so clearly one's first priority should be the product itself, not promoting the product.
The real question then is--how do you make it good? And the answer to that is a dedicated, skilled development team. One person can rarely create a good product on their own; even if they're far better than the other developers, multiple perspectives has an incredibly useful effect on the project. This is why having corporate sponsors is so useful--it puts other developers' (from the corporation) minds on the problem to give their own opinion. This is especially useful in the case that developing the program requires significant expertise that isn't commonly available in the community.
Of course, I'm saying this all from experience. I'm one of the main developers on x264 (currently the most active one), one of the most popular video encoders. We have two main developers, various minor developers in the community that contribute patches, and corporate sponsorship from Joost (Gabriel Bouvigne, who maintains ratecontrol algorithms), from Avail Media (who I work for sometimes on contract and who are currently hiring coders on contract to add MBAFF interlacing support), and from a few others that pop up from time to time.
One good developer doesn't make a project--many good developers do. And the end result of this is a program that encodes video faster and at a far better quality than most commercial competitors, hardware or software, even those with utterly enormous development budgets.
In looking at these issues you might be interested in checking out the online version of a course on open source at UC Berkeley, called Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives. It’s co-taught by Mitch Kapur (Lotus founder) and Paula Samuelson, a law school professor. I have a long commute and put the audio of the course on my iPod last year – they talk a lot about what works, what doesn’t and why, from a very broad (though obviously academic) perspective.
Books have been written on the subject. In fact, you can find a free book here: producing open source software
Really, I think the answer is 'how you run the project'.
All of your examples matter, yes, but the key things are how the interaction between developers is managed, how patches etc are handled/accepted, who's 'in charge' and how they handle that responsibility, and so on and so forth.
Compare and contrast (the history isn't hard to track down!) the management of the development of Class::DBI and DBIx::Class in Perl.
I was just reading tonight an excellent post on the usability aspect of successful vs unsuccessful open source projects.
Excerpt:
A lot of bandwidth has been wasted arguing over the lack of usability in open-source software/free software (henceforth “OSS”). The debate continues at this moment on blogs, forums, and Slashdot comment threads. Some people say that bad usability is endemic to the entire OSS world, while others say that OSS usability is great but that the real problem is the closed-minded users who expect every program to clone Microsoft. Some people contend that UI problems are temporary growing pains, while others say that the OSS development model systematically produces bad UI. Some people even argue that the GPL indirectly rewards software that’s difficult to use! (For the record, I disagree.)
http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/10/05/make_oss_humane/
Just open-source it. Most probably, nobody will start contributing yet. But at least you can write on the press-releases that your product is GPL or whatever.
The first step is that people start using it...
And maybe then, after users get comfortable, they will start contributing.
Everyone's answers have been good so far, but there's one thing missing and that's good oversight. Nothing kills an open source project faster than not having some sort of project management. Not to tell people what to do so much as to just add some structure and tasking for the developers you are hoping to attract.
Disorganized projects fall apart fast. It's not a bird you just let go and watch it fly away.