Going open source?
I’m thinking about open-sourcing my two JavaME (mobile phone) projects, Menstral and Javia-Calculator.
My reserve to open source them until now was caused mainly by a hope to transorm these projects in a commercial offering at some point. So my recent inclination to open-source them also means that I’m not planning to make any money from these projects anymore.
The main reason for open-sourcing is to allow the programs to evolve (bug-fixes & enhacements) even as I have less time (and inclination) to do everything myself. Of course I’m aware that just open-sourcing a project doesn’t automatically create a community around it, and this is the open-source challange.
I have to choose a code repository (SVN). The choices I consider are: SourceForge, Google Projects, and self-hosted. Self-hosted is more work, but also allows for the greatest flexibility.
Considering the license: MIT or GPL? I personally like the MIT license more, as I consider it less restrictive (and much shorter) than GPL. On the other hand, GPL protects against the possibility of competitor closed-source projects freely taking advantage of the code.