Experiences Releasing an Open Source Project

02 Jun 2009 | Tags thoughts

Note: If you want to read about JsChat have a look at the JsChat blog.

I’ve always dabbled with open source (Linux got me through university), but it’s only since GitHub that I’ve released a lot of stuff: GitHub.com/alexyoung — I only had weird experiments on my site before, and I released some stuff through work too (code.helicoid.net). Nothing much drew any major attention until I publicly announced JsChat.

JsChat is a simple protocol for realtime chat. It’s like IRC, but relies on JSON for message encoding and syntax. I made it so it would be easier to build nice web-based chat clients. I built an Ncurses client, but it’s… kind of dodgy. I use it daily but I recognise that it needs work.

The point is that JsChat is about communication. When you visit the site, you can join a chat room straight away. Therefore, when the project appeared on Ruby news sites, it was inevitable that people would join a chat room and talk to us.

This is what happened:

  • People complained that we were using polling instead of Juggernaut or other Flash-sockets hacks — they didn’t seem to realise the project was more than the web client, or that I specifically decided not to rely on technologies like Flash
  • People complained about the language and libraries I used (I had good reasons for using these too)
  • People joined and made random racist comments
  • 90% of people joined with a name like ‘test’ and wrote random noise. JsChat loads the lastlog automatically in the web client, so it’s obvious that people are having real conversations

On the plus side:

  • We made some friends through JsChat
  • Some people are now using it in their sites for professional projects
  • We got lots of bug reports and useful feedback
  • People said they liked the interface design