Open Source it!

Why not ?

I think you did this wonderful soft in .NET.

Yeah, it's in .NET.

My main hesitations with open-sourcing are maintaining control (both in terms of credit, avoiding competing spin-offs (particularly malicious ones) and the direction/philosophy of the project), and the additional headache of managing, checking and merging changes in. I know I'd get bugs fixed and featured added without possibly less effort, but that isn't appealing enough for me at the moment to outweigh the potential negatives.

If I ever stopped developing TVRename, I'd open-source it so someone else could carry it on (maybe after tidying up the code a bit )

Does anyone out there have experience in open-sourcing one of their own creations?

All the software I've written (which, admitedly, isn't much) I've released as open source.

Currently the best setup IMHO is google code. You can assign who has access to change the code, and get revisioning so if someone breaks something you can undo their changes. Their bug reporting system is nice too. I know that managing other people's changes can be a pain...but what I would recommend is let people see the code, and post patches for bug fixes/new features. They can't change the code directly, but they can help add to it. If someone contributes enough good code, consider making them a dev and letting them merge their changes directly.

Avoiding spin offs is, frankly, unavoidable. If someone wanted to, they could just take your existing compiled program and bundle some malware with it. People should always make sure they are getting their software from a reliable source.

As far as the direction of the program - if you use the GPL license, people are free to take the code and start their own version of it, though they are required to still give you credit and release it as open source as well. Other open source licenses are more/less restrictive - you can pick one that meets your needs.

Personally, I'd be quite interested in adding a few features that I require - most of which are already on the voting list. I would do this for free, let you keep control of the project, and keep any donations (BTW, I bought you a drink, hope you enjoyed it!). I'd like a line in the credits if I helped out, but even that I'd be willing to forgo - I just want my features added!

If you are still unwilling to open source the project, I respect that - it's your code and you are free to do with it what you wish. But I think it would make tvrename a much better project, because instead of people giving you bug reports and feature requests, they can give you bug reports and feature requests with the code to fix/implement it already there for you. If you are willing to give me a copy of the code (with a promise not to release it to anyone else), I'd love to take a crack at adding some features. Mostly, I'm after sequential numbering options (rather than by season, mostly for anime which doesn't really have seaons, just episode counts), and being able to export the show info to a pretty HTML file so the rest of the people in the house can see it. I don't have much .net programming experience, but I'm pretty good at picking up and modifying existing code in any language.

Thanks for your feedback.. I could possibly be talked into releasing it to a few people to work on, rather than open-sourcing it all at once. If that goes well, then it could be opened further. I'd definitely give credit for any work done.

If I remember (remind me if I don't), I'll send you a message once I've got the version I'm currently working on to a beta release, and we can chat further about you doing some work on TVRename.

Personally i'd love some sort of abstraction layer so the interface/app could be used for:

1 - tv
2 - movies (imdb, themoviedb sources)
3 - mp3 (discogs source)

I've tried about 5-6 different movie renamers/organisers and all are utter rubbish.

This i started using and it worked, its clean, and you focus on actual features and not skins

I know that's not your main focus, but it'd be good if someone else could using the groundwork move in that direction

Interesting idea, and I'm kinda moving in that direction, too. You could have a separate tab for defining movie/mp3 collections (in addition to the current TV one). The next version will have just one "Scan" tab (rather than separate missing/renaming), and having one list of "things to do". Handling different types of media in different ways will fit nicely into that.

And I promise that TVRename will never ever be skinned. I hate skins.

+1 for no skins...they generally make the program look horrible anyways. And tvrename is and should always be about functionality, not prettiness.

Regardless of making it open-source or not, you should definitely use something else then the forum for bug-reporting & feature requests. That way you can control it more easy, make priorities, choose which version it will be fixed in, and so on and so on. You could even start a google-code project, and just use the report-system they have, without using the code-part, and that way it would be a smooth transition if you ever choose to make it open-source. Personally I admire that you actually manage to keep control over it the way it works today.

Good idea.. At the moment my "bug tracking" is just a text file, with brief descriptions and links to any related forum posts I'll have a look into the google thing sometime soon.

Personally i'd love some sort of abstraction layer so the interface/app could be used for:

3 - mp3 (discogs source)
I use MusicBrainz Picard for music tagging. I use to use MediaMonkey, but I like the MusicBrainz database better than using Amazon.com as a tagging resource (much more consistent )

I don't know if that'd meet your needs or not, but worth a shot.

I use MusicBrainz Picard for music tagging. I use to use MediaMonkey, but I like the MusicBrainz database better than using Amazon.com as a tagging resource (much more consistent )

I don't know if that'd meet your needs or not, but worth a shot.

Possibly not. Most of my music is electronic (ie particular remixes, etc) rather than standard songs which are just Artist - Title.

Discogs handles most of the songs, just need to find a nice interface on top of it.

I'd be guessing that amazon wouldnt have a lot of rarer remixes of songs.

Does anyone out there have experience in open-sourcing one of their own creations?

I personally release all of my personal projects that could be of use to anyone as open-source, currently my most active one is http://code.google.com/p/xbmcupdate/

I would be more than happy to help out if you chose to add me to the list of people that get a copy of the code.

Let the fun begin!

http://code.google.com/p/tvrename/

Edit: In the near future I'll add my list of bugs and requested features to its issue tracker, and put in a bit of helpful information on how it all works internally.

Legend!