Updated #opensource Tag Guidelines
Tags: opensource, meta
Published: 2019-07-17 13:58:50

---
title: Updated #opensource Tag Guidelines
published: true
description: 
tags: opensource, meta
---

**Updated 8 April 2020**

The `#opensource` tag is awesome, but it's also been lacking a lot of focus. Is it for promoting projects? Talking about open source? Posting lists of the top 20 open source Javascript modules? It's hard to tell.

In a way, because the lion's share of our technologies, libraries, tools, and projects are open source, *nearly everything* qualified for this tag before. It was becoming our site's *junk drawer* as it were - lots of nifty and useful stuff, but no semblance of organization to any of it.

Since DEV.to rolled out [Listings](https://dev.to/listings), I'm taking the opportunity to narrow the tag focus a bit. The goal is to give the #opensource tag clear topic boundaries, so Following it doesn't lead to a bunch of irrelevant posts leaking into your feed.

## New Guidelines

I've updated the tag guidelines, but I wanted to lay out the changes here.

* Posts promoting a single project should go on [Listings](https://dev.to/listings), or on [`#showdev`](https://dev.to/t/showdev) or [`#news`](https://dev.to/t/news) if it qualifies.

* Posts *using* or *mentioning* one or more open source projects should go on the appropriate tags for the relevant languages and technologies. This includes tutorials, "round ups", guides, comparisons, reviews, and the like. These typically land in #opensource, and are the main reason for the tag clutter.

* Announcements relating to your awesome project, including new features, releases, versions, and the like, should go on [`#news`](https://dev.to/t/news) or [Listings](https://dev.to/listings), or should be expanded out into a proper article (tutorial, maybe?) and posted on the appropriate technology tags.

* Open source contributor requests should go on [`#contributorswanted`](https://dev.to/t/contributorswanted) or [Listings](https://dev.to/listings).

* If you're just bursting with pride at something you built, use the [`#showdev`](https://dev.to/t/showdev) tag instead.

* "Roundups" and other lists of cool open source projects belong on [`#githunt`](https://dev.to/t/githunt).

## What Changed?

All this mainly means **the `#opensource` tag is no longer valid merely if the project(s) being discusses happen to be open source!**

To put that another way, here's a few theoretical topics which *would* have been #opensource material before, but aren't now.

* "Top 10 Open Source Python Data Modules" (`#python`)
* "My Awesome Data Visualizer in Go" (`#go`, `#showdev`)
* "Looking for contributors to Supercoolproject" (Listings or `#contributorswanted`)
* "What I did on my Perl project this week" (`#perl`, `#devjournal`, possibly `#showdev`)
* "Installing Epictool on Ubuntu" (`#ubuntu`)
* "5 Open Source Alternatives to AWS" (`#cloud`)

## What SHOULD It Be?

Articles in this tag should be about at least one of these three broad topics:

* Organizing, managing, running, contributing to, or working in an Open Source project.

* Open Source philosophy, licensing, and/or practical and legal topics thereof.

* Advocacy and adoption of Open Source *philosophy*.

## Aliases

`#foss` and `#freesoftware` have been aliased over to `#opensource` (thanks @michaeltharrington!) and the tag info updated to account for that. I know that Free Software is culturally distinct from Open Source, but as the former is always compliant to a subset of the latter, having one tag for all just makes sense.

## Guideline Enforcement

I won't be applying this to any posts before July 17th 2019 (retroactive guidelines just aren't fair).

If the `#opensource` tag is used incorrectly in new posts, I'll remove it and provide a friendly reminder, along with suggestions on better tags to use. I know it'll take a while to get used to the updated rules, so don't worry if you miss it a few dozen times.