How to organize project for open-source release [closed]

Question

I am planning to release as open-source a personal project for mostly educational (if any) purposes. It is Windows only.

My own code will be released under the MIT license, but I also use this libraries/components:

• ODE
• Scintilla
• Scintilla PJ Naughter component
• glaux

Apart for making sure I include each of these libraries license files, how should I integrate them in the source code release tree?

Currently for each one I use a particular release/revision which I manually customized or built and integrated in terms of source code files and binary library files. Is this enough? I don't want to burden the resulting package with full 3rd party source trees, but at the same time I want it compilable from scratch.

Also I want to include my final compiled executable files. Is this frown upon? I will check the resulting exe's with VirusTotal.

Answer 1

At least, you should add a COPYING file containing the full text of the used license (for instance MIT). I think this is the only required file.

I usually also include NEWS and AUTHORS. It could be also a good idea to add a DEPENDENCIES file.