Allan FriedmanAnyone know of research on how people “discover” new open source that they want to use? Does one search GitHub for strings relevant to what they are looking for? See code used in other projects? Are there other registries?
Michael Richardson@allanfriedman Depends upon who the people are. Developers using language foo or framework bar, will usually wind up at the language/framework site looking, but general search will often work. So, "rubygems.org" if I'm in ruby, rust-lang.org/RUST, python.org, etc.
@allanfriedman I think that end-users wind up via word of mouth, recommendations from some tech article, or even youtube sponsorship ("odoo" for example). I wouldn't start with github, because it's search is terrible, it will confuse with overloaded uses of the terms, etc. I'm sure that there are many PHB's {now called "vibe" coders}, who will go to github, get totally confused, and then post queries to the wrong project ML, having ignored _How to Ask Questions the Smart Way_
⠵⠻⠷⠕⠭ 🍥🍉⚪🌹@allanfriedman Not sure if you mean code or applications but AlternativeTo has been around for a while, and similar sites.
Brandon Mitchell@allanfriedman depends on what kind of OSS. Bigger things I search for comparison sites. For things under a package manager, I search that. There are also "awesome" repositories in GitHub that have a curated list of tools for various ecosystems.
Jean-Baptiste Maillet@allanfriedman I'm not aware of any formal academic study on that.
But as for me, it depends on the codebase / ecosystem I'm working with. There are some registries for that:
Ex if I work in Python, that will be PyPI, the Python Package Indexer:
https://pypi.org/
For Rust, crates.io:
https://crates.io/
For Go:
https://pkg.go.dev/
Of course also searching or google searching on GitHub.
etc. Plus technological survey, most important for me since I'm working on embedded products = 95% C/C++ = no de facto package manager = no de facto package registry. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Patrik Svensson@allanfriedman I follow interesting people on GitHub. In the "Explore" view, you can see what these people star, fork, and create. Found a lot of interesting OSS projects that way.
R.I.Pienaar@allanfriedman I miss freshmeat.net. (Old registry of OSS projects, think yahoo catalog)
@allanfriedman I also miss the time when the idea of a registry was even sensible - as owner of one of the biggest “awesome lists” I am pretty sure it can never work.
But mostly the answer now is go digging around awesome lists.
Emelia 👸🏻@allanfriedman GitHub search is useless for discovering open source; usually I hear through word of mouth, via social media and newsletters.
jadedctrl 
@allanfriedman I generally use le DuckDuckGo or GitHub searches, unfortunately. I’m trying to get in the habit of using the Free Software Directory, though. ^^