I caught a post by James Governor that resonated because I think Adobe is doing it right. The premise of the post is that your code is all you need for PR. Sometimes that’s releasing code, but more importantly, when you control a project, it’s about making your code easy to access and to take contributions for. As Don says, measure success by merges, not by forks.

The two awesome examples of that? PhoneGap and Brackets. PhoneGap/Cordova has an active and long established community. It’s not really an “Adobe” project at all, but a project that Adobe contributes heavily too in the form of engineering resources and we submitted the project to Apache when we acquired Nitobi last fall. That said, one of the strong points of the project is that the barrier to entry for commits is pretty damn low (in a good way). But the perfect example in my mind is Brackets. We’re all excited about the number of watchers and forks that Brackets has had. But using Don’s metric above, I think Brackets could be judged as being even more successful than those numbers show. According to the Github Impact Graph we’ve had 39 different committers over the 37 weeks of the project. Considering the team at Adobe that’s working on brackets is about 10 people, that’s a fantastic number.

It speaks to the team, the quality of the code, and the vision behind the project, but it also tells me Adobe is doing it right. That’s awesome. And to that end, major props to the Source Sans Pro team who put that font up on Github this morning.