---
title: A big merge is the only press release your open source project needs
date: 2012-08-20T14:29:39Z
modified: 2012-08-20T16:40:32Z
permalink: "https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/a-big-merge-is-the-only-press-release-your-open-source-project-needs/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: ""
wpid: 3832
categories:
  - Uncategorized
timestamp: 2012-08-20T16:40:32Z
tags:
  - Uncategorized
---

> A big merge is the only press release your open source project needs now [bit.ly/PxEYSo](http://t.co/W2BUQx9H "http://bit.ly/PxEYSo")
> 
> — Ted Nyman (@tnm) [August 20, 2012](https://twitter.com/tnm/status/237388933795823616)

I came across this tweet via the awesome [Prismatic](http://getprismatic.com/news/home) service, which brings me cool content I didn’t know I was looking for. The comment talks to something we have been talking about at RedMonk for a while. Code, rather than PR, is what talks when developers are the potential community in question. Github is your resume. Github is increasingly where you foster community in the age of distributed version control, where [forks are OK](http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/04/01/github/), as long as they support the [art and science of the merge](http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2012/07/13/measure-success-by-merges-not-forks/). Developer engagement is increasingly peer to peer, with Github as the communications layer. If you want to work with developers you have to understand this dynamic.

Open source foundations, and vendors supporting open source projects, of course [still have a significant role to play in software development at large](http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2011/11/28/you-wont-get-fired-for-using-apache/), but developers don’t read press releases. Developers [are their own best marketers](http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2012/07/24/developers-or-marketers-nah-developers-are-marketers/), and they do it with code.