I’ve got a great idea for an open source project. What should I do before starting, to make sure that I’m not duplicating anyone’s efforts?
Of course I’ve googled, but which keywords to use isn’t obvious. Is there a site to discuss such ideas?
To address a common answer: My goal is not to be the author of a successful project. It is to make sure that this product exists, and can be improved. (There’s already a similar commercial venture, which is of low quality and not being developed.) Thus, it won’t help me to have the only project that can be found in this niche. If there’s a start out there, I’d like to find it and help.
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Of course I’ve googled, but which keywords to use isn’t obvious. Is there a site to discuss such ideas?
If it not easily find-able it may as well not exist, so you aren’t duplicating efforts.
Put yourself in the shoes of the person that’s going to come looking for your product. What problem have they just hit? What are they going to search for?
If you can’t figure that out, it doesn’t matter if you’re the only product in the marketplace, you’re going to have a terrible time getting people to use it.
If you can figure it out, it doesn’t matter if there are 20 identical products, if they can’t be found and yours can.
First off it is often good to have more than one project in a certain space. I am glad that there is more than one open source database for instance. If you plan on implementing it in a specific language try that language’s favorite source code hang outs, Perl’s CPAN, Python’s Pypi, Haskell’s Cabal, Ruby’s gems, etc…
Give it a try, if it is a duplicate of someone else’s work you get the question how is this different than project X. That way you can outsource the search to the community.
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