Talk about developing open-source for everyone

[Zyx]

For a long time I've been fascinated with the idea of open-source. I saw many projects developed by many people from the whole world. Soon, I started developing my own open-source software, but I came across a serious problem: nationality and cultural issues and I'd like to get some useful information how to manage a true international open-source project.

 

I'll describe my situation. I live and work in Poland, where there are many good programmers who like to use open-source software, but aren't very interested in developing it. The local community is quite active, but rather limited to the local issues and if there is a successful project, it is primarily written for local programmers and rather unknown in other countries. For now, I can imagine only one Polish project that some of you could hear about: PHPTAL, but unfortunately it was developed somewhere else and taken-over by a Polish programmer later. Some of the problems come from the specific local issues. I.e. in Poland some programmers do not know English and expect that Polish project should have Polish docs, tutorials and everything including bugtracker which CANNOT be multilingual (but at the same time they seem not to have problems with understanding "foreign" projects ). The other ones come from the much poorer knowledge about international communities and their expectations, but it seems that many projects managed to deal with it. How the situation looks in your countries? Have you got any advices or useful information about programmers' expectations and useful resources? I know that English language is actually the basis, but once we translate everything and force the local programmers to use English too, where to go next? I would very appreciate any help.

[keldorn]

My gripe with it people who make opensource web softwares, is that  it lowers the barrier to entry in some markets. Some niches can be absolutely saturated to the point of zero-profit condition. Ruining it for the people who did have the skills the create their own software. Thats why some niches like Image hosting are impossible to enter, becuase there so many open source image hosting scripts the whole niche completly staturated. Even if you programmed your own image hosting script and your start up might end up going unknown, awashed in the hundreds of other now dime a dozen image hosting sites.

[Zyx]

I agree, but a proprietary software can be created with no costs, too, by everyone who has a computer and is skilled enough to write a nice computer program. If there was no open-source software, you would probably have the same situation, as today except that everything would be paid and closed for any personalizations. Anyway, that is not the answer for my question.

[JonnoTheDev]

Anyway, that is not the answer for my question.

Agreed. Anyhow, there is an open-source equivalent for any commercial software so talk of market saturation is nonsense. It is not the actual creation of the product that matters, it is the support for the software. That is where the divide between open source and commercial software lies.

 

However, if you are interested in the open source community then you are best getting involved in a current project. There are hundreds of projects that you could undertake like frameworks, e-commerce software, etc. You will get a better understanding of how the community operates.