Some random thoughts
Why?
When it comes to open sourcing a project, they key question should be: “Why do I want to do this?”
Typical reasons are:
- growing a user community to find additional contributors or at least be notified about bugs (drive further project development, get support)
- recruiting (find good developers)
- marketing (offer your services based on a reference project)
A not-so-good reason is: “I just want to throw it over the fence so people can do with it whatever they like.”
How?
Another question to answer is: “How exactly do you want to handle/maintain this?”
Once you open source a project that is potentially interesting for others, there is a risk of this act generating overheads for you:
- People might have questions: Who will answer them? Will you allow GitHub issues to be opened?
- People might think they found a bug and expect you to do your own research and potentially fix it.
- There might even be people who would like to actively contribute to the project. Will you want to allow GitHub pull requests? Who will regularly review and assess
- Users/followers of the project might expect to see it continuously maintained, e.g. in terms of updating external dependencies. Who would be the one to do this?