[sbegaudeau]

My company has open sourced a lot of code (80% of our products) and finding people outside willing to contribute is actually quite difficult if you don't do things properly. We actually spent quite some time to improve the build and the branding, to check the intellectual property of our dependencies etc.

If you want real contributors, building a community often require a good documentation, examples, etc.

[babuskov]

From my 10+ years of experience: if you want contributors, build something that people really need, that is not available on the market. Build it just enough to solve the main problem it should. Make it really open and easy to contribute. People will chip in to scratch their own itches with the software.

Also, make sure you keep developing it yourself further in the open. Discuss features and architecture with community. Nobody wants to work on a code dump of commercially failed project. You can get a lot of help, if you show leadership by example.

[caseysoftware]

Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software is hands down one of the best books possible on building communities and driving contributions. It was written ~10 years ago (pre-Github) so it's a bit dated but he's working on an update now - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kfogel/updating-produci...