Question

Suppose I’d like to upload some eggs on the Cheese Shop. Do I have any obligation? Am I required to provide a license? Am I required to provide tests? Will I have any obligations to the users of this egg ( if any ) ?

I haven’t really released anything as open source ’till now, and I’d like to know the process.

Answer 1

1. You have an obligation to register the package with a useful description. Nothing is more frustrating than finding a Package that may be good, but you don’t know, because there is no description.

   Typical example of Lazy developer: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/gevent/0.9.1

   Better: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/itty/0.6.0

   Fantastic (even a changelog!): http://pypi.python.org/pypi/jarn.mkrelease/2.0b2

2. On CheeseShop you can also choose to just register the package, but not upload the code. Instead you can provide your own downloading URL. DO NOT DO THAT! That means that your software gets unavailable when cheeseshop is down or when your server is down. That means that if you want to install a system that uses your software, the chances that it will fail because a server is down somewhere doubles. And with a big system, when you have five different servers involved… Always upload the package to the CheeseShop as well as registering it!

3. You also have the obligation not to remove the egg (except under exceptional circumstances) as people who starts to depend on a specific version of your software will fail if you remove that version.

   If you don’t want to support the software anymore, upload a new version, with a big fat “THIS IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED SOFTWARE” or something, on top of the description.

   And don’t upload development versions, like “0.1dev-r73183”.

4. And although you may not have an “obligation” to License your software, you kinda have to, or the uploading gets pointless. If you are unsure, go with GPL.

That’s it as far as I’m concerned. Sorry about the ranting. 😉