I am happier when I see copyleft but let’s be honest, I would contribute to an interesting, useful project regardless of their choice between MIT and GPL. Same for companies: some prefer MIT, but there is no way they are not going to contribute to the Linux Kernel just because of copyleft. So bottom line is: make something that people enjoy/find useful and see contributors flocking.

CLAs are a different matter: I do not contribute to projects which ask you to assign them copyright unless I 100% trust the organisation behind them.

As a contributor, I never particularly cared about permissions if I participate in a project with a few patches. It becomes useful when you are diagnosing a CI problem, etc. and you need to push a lot of tweaks to discover where the bug is located.

More generally, treat contributors like you want to be treated. Try to be responsive, compassionate, guide them through the process of having a PR merged, be ready to fix a minor mess or two, congratulate them on a job well done.

Open development is as much a story of people as a story of code.

Customization for big enterprises is actually a viable business model, only if it generates as much money as the company sustains and can continue to expand?

Yes, it is only a viable business model in the end if it generates enugh revenues to cover materials and labour, like every business on planet Earth.

I am sorry to say some of what you write is not correct.

Red Hat — I know they had their slice of controversies lately, but still — is a ≃33bn USD company, how is that not making money? They sell solutions based on OSS (different from selling software!), which is one viable way of making money.

Other ways are: selling support, selling licence exceptions (when you are the sole copyright holder of the codebase, MySQL did that), sponsored development for new features, SaaS (bad!), customization for big enterprises/public actors, open-sourcing software but keeping assets proprietary (some games do that), and many more.

I feel one of the most important things for a thriving open source project is easy onboarding.

Statement of friendliness and similar are not that useful if I don’t know where to start to contribute to your project. A clean, up to date CONTRIBUTING file goes a long way, architecture documentation is extremely good, optimal is having an experience developer checking your patches and offering help.

Repositories that I contribute to the most helped me in the first phases of the journey, it was awesome, I gave back.

Nope! Little known to people, you just need to locally clone your repository with --bare and upload that. You will see you can clone it even if you don’t have a git server!

It is a very slick, minimalist solution.

It might not be a solution for everyone, but you can self host a git repository on your static site!

stagit is a static git site generator. It is lean, you can self host it even of the cheapest of shared hosting and it makes code browseable via html, which is a plus for sharing and receiving suggestions/contributions.

For a relatively small, low bandwith project it is a charm. As an example, here are my repositories.

Documentation is very useful today (to clarify our thoughts on what is useful and what is not, what is in scope and what is not), and for our future selves.

Writing small bits of software made me appreciative of the work teams put on large pieces of infrastructure!

If some code links to your GPL library, the whole project has to be licenced GPLv3, full stop. This does not “prevent people to use [it] at all”, it just stipulates that they have to make the source available and the source of improvements they make available. Each substantial library I write in my free time is GPLv3. I want to contribute to the ecosystem and I want everyone enjoying my work contributing back to the ecosystem.

A similar licence, called LGPL, allows dynamic linking without having to make the code of the whole project available, just the code of the specific library + improvements. If for some reason you need this, I invite you to check how dynamic linking works in Pharo and read this FAQ by the FSF (and all other FAQs, it is a very clear, informative document).

File an issue in their repos, sometimes people (understandably) do not understand licencing very well — or it might be they were granted an exception.

If that fails you can contact the library author and the repositories who host the code.

Great suggestions in this discussion! Rather than adding my favourites, I will add some resources that list more games.

• Libregamewiki: it is really comprehensive (sometimes too much, including even not-so-good-games). They care about licencing and is is very easy to browse, top-notch for me.
• Open source games: a more relaxed repository, with lots of material.
• bobeff open source list: this is curated, which means that there are not so many games but each and every one is stable, good, maintained.
• Arcane Cache: a fantastic blog with reviews of libre games — or more precisely, underground games, there is a lot of discussion on how gamedevving philosophy too. The reviews are always in-depth and allow you to experience the games on another level, and each game is a small jewel in its category. Strongly recommended!

I hope to come off as harsh, but documentation quality is an important factor for both discoverability and adoption.

At least there are instructions — which I haven’t tried yet — on how to build the app.

remind is a bit more complex but quite useful.