One of the best references for developing open source software is Karl Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software. This book is perhaps the best resource for individuals and companies who want to participate in the open source community.

The thing I really admire about Karl’s book is that in keeping with the spirit of OSS it is released under a Creative Commons license so that it can be downloaded, distributed and adapted for free with the only restriction being that you provide attribution to the author.

This book was written in 2005 and since then quite a few things have changed. CVS and Subversion have given way to git for distributed version control. Cloudmania. The copyleft GPL license has waned in popularity to the Apache Software License. Microsoft even has spun off a open source company, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc (No that’s not a joke).

So Karl still needs to pay the bills and having some cash in the bank will allow him to work on an updated second edition so if you love open source software and want to see a second edition break open your pocketbooks and pledge your support for the 2nd Edition of Producing Open Source Software on Kickstarter.