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I have just accepted the second developer into an open source project. I\'m not

ID: 642279 • Letter: I

Question

I have just accepted the second developer into an open source project. I'm not going to say which it is, for obvious reasons (read the rest of this question.)

The project is a C# / .NET projectl

A while ago I contacted JetBrains, authors of ReSharper, dotCover, and TeamCity.

Since I am the leader of the open source project, I got "open source" licenses for ReSharper, dotCover, and TeamCity.

The important part is that the licenses I got for the project, for those products, are for all members of my project, not just me.

The question is this:

When advertising that the project requires more people (it does), should I mention the licenses involved?
On one had, I feel that mentioning the licenses might make people not really interested in the project apply for it, because they would get those licenses, and thus be people more interested in the licenses than the project, i.e. "noise".

On the other hand, the licenses could be a bonus, an ... "upshot" ... and thus might make more people interested in my project, in other words I might attract people that could be a bonus to the project, that weren't aware of it before.

So...

Should I advertise the licenses involved?

Or not?

Explanation / Answer

I think that an important phase of becoming a contributor in an open-source project is being, actually, an active contributor.

That is, you should only grant the logistical status of contributor to people you actually trust; who has offered pull requests, participated in the project's mailing list, etc.

Those tools are not an absolute requisite to contributing to your project. They may enhance your workflow, but not having a licence should not stop them from contributing to your project.

So to answer your question:

Yes, you will receive more requests. People like free things, even if they don't really need it.
But at the same time: No, the people who is going to participate in your project are going to do so because they need you project to be successful - they may need it for work, for example. So giving licences for free is not going to give you more good contributors. They come to your project for a different reason.
My suggestions:

Don't state that you give such licences.
Set as recognised contributors

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