Incentives

[RichardLitt]

Currently, the open source protocol lacks a clear incentive for usage. Yes, it theoretically sounds nice; let's add more markup to say where something is hosted. But, after implementing, there are no real pathways in for developers to see the meta tags. Some developers may occasionally see the source in the header when looking at the code. Or, the web developer may have editor access, and may explicitly mention somewhere on the site that they are using it, gathering some attention that way. However, barring these two small options, there is currently no way that most people who would be interested would notice that the Open Source Protocol has been implemented. This means that it is largely not useful.

I think this is a development problem, and I think that there are possible solutions. They need to be implemented, and I need to market them appropriately so that there is enough of a critical mass to make OSP self-replicate. Here, I'd like to open up the discussion for others on how to make OSP useful.

Some ideas.

Direct reference

• A badge you could put in your footer, linking to your site. Largely for static websites hosted by developers.
• Inclusion in the "Fork this project" badge that some people have on their GitHub pages.
• A Chrome or Firefox extension that adds a badge saying "Go to source" when it detects OSP.

Indirect reference

• An extension that searches for references to source code on GitHub for a website, anyway, and shows the user a way to suggest changes to the content. In this badge, I could mention OSP as a way of making sure that the links are correct.
• A directory of all GitHub, GitLab, or other common open source git-hosted websites, which could be useful for other reasons (assumedly. Got to think about that).
• Including OSP in some other major websites people look at a lot (Craigslist, Facebook, and so on), where developers are more likely to find it.
• Directly reaching out to GitLab or GitHub about possible uses for OSP.

[RichardLitt]

Another thing we could do: List all websites using it here. Searching on GitHub finds around 300 repositories currently implementing it (which, side note, is AMAZING).