Dear architect,
Did you create an extraordinary project? Do you think might benefit your fellow architects? Are you willing to share your talent?
Many open-source projects began just with an “itch”, quoting Eric Raymond’s “Cathedral and Bazaar”:
“Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.”
Maybe your project will be built somewhere, maybe you’ve got paid to do the work, but once it’s done it might disappear from the memory and your greatness might be forgotten.
This might be changed if you “Open Source” your project and share your awesomeness and creativity with your peers. Your work might help a fellow architect somewhere in world, that needs to solve similar problems that were solved already by you.
Sharing your work with fellow architects will bring you greatness and recognition while helping others.
So, this is how you open source you project:
- Fix your “source code”. Clean your DWG, SKP, RVT files (or any other files), Organize your files in folders that make sense. You want to show your best and most professional side.
- Provide a readme.md file with a short description of the project and highlights. It is important to understand the content and scope of the project without having to download it. You might want to provide some renders and visualizations. A good description will help the project to be found by search engines.
- Add a license file to make sure that you are not liable, that it would be safe to re-use your work and that you are credited for your creativity. Copy and edit this template of the Open Architecture license.
- Upload your project to a sharing platform like Github, Bitbucket, Open blocks.
- Celebrate your project with others, post about it on your website, Futurearchi, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other places.
We, architects, are a part of a long and glorious tradition of creativity interwoven with technological innovation based on a free and open culture. Open source is how our culture works in the digital age.