I have a lot of experiment with open-source, but most of it on the "client" side.

Now, I came up with a series of classes and utility that I've wrote over the years in PHP that I feel like releasing on a open license.
I was thinking about 1 class first (an XML/XSL abstraction class) but it has some dependencies to databases wrappers (PDO extensions) and others.

Thinking about it, I have no reason to keep them private, they don't hold any voodoo magic.
So I started to pack them in a specific project, clean them up and so.
They where all already documented javaDoc style, so not much problems on that part.

What I see now is that I need is an step by step tutorial about how to set it up.
To set it up, you need to edit some files and to do a bit of php/apache configuration.

So: License , documentation, tutorial...
Do you see something else that I might have overlooked ?

Does any of you have any experience (and maybe backfire) of releasing something you've done to the public ?

You might want something in there that removes any liability if someone uses the code. That might be in one of the creative commons licenses. I'm not really sure.

I was more thinking about a BSD style license. A lot like GPL, but allows the "product" to be used in commercial applications without needing them to be released as GPL (think Tivo here).

But of course, there will be a clause stating this, even if it's usefulness might be arguable

I've only used open source from the user side so I've never had to consider all the things you might do to release something. I will say that once you do it would make an interesting blog post or article.

The biggest obstacle to choosing a license is to make sure that any code that your code relies on allows your code to be licensed that way. ie. if your PHP code uses another PHP library, you can't just license your code however you like... you have to make sure that the license you choose is compatible with that of the library that your code uses.

As far as limited liability goes, you don't really need to explicitly specify this as most of the FOSS licenses do this already. I mean it doesn't hurt, but I wouldn't be too worried if I didn't mention it in a FOSS release of my own.

I just released my first open source project recently and used http://www.opensource.org/licenses to figure out which license I wanted to go with.

Out of curiosity, since this is a PHP thing, why not use the PHP 5 simplexml object? What are the advantages? Yes, that might be more appropriate for a separate thread, but if you do create such a thread could you PM me the link as I don't have time to catch all of the threads on this forum -- just too many.

It's not to read XML, but to create it, and have a simple way to associate XSL style sheets.

Nothing it does cannot be done manually, but it's just a simple library that can help those who want to start.
Actually, it's based upon the xmlwriter extension.
I'm in the process of cleaning the code and commenting it correctly to run phpdoc over it.
And I still have to figure a simple and extensible way to provide several distinct output types (1 for html output, 1 for wml output and so on...)

If you are interested, I can give you a subversion account for this.
In fact, I seriously think about hosting a subversion repository at sourceForge.
It would be a great way to share it, beside tgz/zip packages from time to time

I may be interested in looking at the code, but I don't use subversion. The only time I tried to to anything with subversion, it corrupted the ports on my computer and caused me a 3-day headache.

If I were to release an entire program, I would use the GPL. But, for what your doing, I would choose a BSD style license though the LGPL would probably work too.

If you just uses the client, it won't do anything with the ports.
But the server, I never even thought to try to run it on windows...

Gimme a couple of hours, and I'll put a tarball on one of my sites.
I'm gonna spend some time with the family now...