Re: How to get beta testers?

[Alex Bennee <alex braddahead com>]

On Wed, 2002-12-18 at 18:50, Bryan Brown wrote:
> What's the procedure for asking for beta testers?

A good way to attract people interested in your program is to announce
it on Freshmeat (www.freshmeat.net). Mark it as Beta and see who comes
along. Are you hosting your development anywhere (sourceforge?) and do
you have some basic webpages explaining what it does and how to build
it.

> I've ported my Earth map drawing program from the Amiga to Linux using Gtk
> 1.2 and the gnome libraries, and I think that in a few weeks (once I
> finish cleaning out the debug code) it'll be ready for people to bash on
> it to find bugs.

Does it run? As long as its not completely borked follow the OS mantra
"release early, release often" :-) But its your code your choice.

> The app draws several different kinds of map projections as well as some
> views from user-specified orbital altitudes.
>
> Once it's ready for prime time I'd like to release it under the GNU
> license, so what's the procedure for getting that going?

You may find people don't bother looking at your app if the beta isn't
under some sort of OSI approved license (of which GPL is the most
popular). Any particular reason for holding back?

To actually license under GPL you can just include the boiler plate
COPYING file (get it from http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.txt) in your
distribution tarball. More correctly you can add copyright notices to
your program output and at the top of source files. It depends on how
much of a purist you want to be. A lot of my perl scripts just have the
line "available under the terms of the GPL v2" at the top, but it
probably wouldn't stand up in court (IANAL).

See http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html

Good luck with your app.

-- 
Alex Bennee
Senior Hacker, Braddahead Ltd
The above is probably my personal opinion and may not be that of my
employer