A few years ago, I made an open source project that grew fairly popular. A lot of companies used it. Yet, I had no idea who they were! It came as a complete surprise when Wikipedia, one of the most trafficked websites online, reached out to me saying they were using it on their website!
Open source code is everywhere, but open source project maintainers have no idea where their code is being used. It's really unfortunate, because if the project maintainers knew more about their users, both parties could really benefit. Project maintainers could better understand what regular usage looks like, instead of just those who bring bug reports or feature requests. If there's a major new version or important security fix, the maintainers could notify all their users about updating. And if the maintainers wanted to run a funding campaign, they could ask all the companies using their project about donating.
When the main contributor to RVM (Ruby Version Manager) ran his $51k fundraiser, how many of the companies using RVM even knew about the fundraiser? 10%?
RVM still succeeded, and I'm sure they hustled hard, I'm just pointing out that if they had a list of companies using RVM, they would have certainly appreciated it! When running a crowdfunding campaign, getting the word out to those who would contribute is a big deal, among the most important things you can do. A customer list would make it much easier.
That's why I'm making a CRM (customer relationship management) platform for software projects.
First, project maintainers add the library to their project. Their end users will see a MissingProjectToken exception when they first use the project.
After running the command supso update and providing an email address, the end user will receive a client token verifying
they have completed this step. This resolves the exception. The project will then work as usual.
This gives the project maintainers insight into who is actually using their project. As mentioned before, this has many benefits for the project maintainers as well as the end users. The end users can always unsubscribe from the list if they so choose.
I plan to use this with my projects going forward, and I'm looking for others to join me.
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