Ask HN: What makes a good open-source project? DO's and DON'Ts?

Agreed with viraptor on using a license you are comfortable with right from the beginning.

The license also determines if your project will be used by companies. It also determines if you could potentially monetize the project later on if you want to. It's always possible to relicense or have a dual-license but I find that confusing.

From my experience, the crucial part is to keep the community healthy and non-toxic. That's really hard as a project grows to attract more and more people.

Your role will likely become that of the maintainer at some point of time. You won't contribute much to the code. You will do code reviews, prioritize issues, ...

Everything exists with a slightly different context, so don't expect some strict guidelines... maybe apart from "It's better if it exists". Just release it. You can figure out the details as you go: how to deal with contributions, issues, versioning, etc.

Also, while you can change your license down the track, it may be better to figure out which one you want to use from the beginning.