Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
32 lines (21 loc) · 3.08 KB

Contributions-1-4-Ind.md

File metadata and controls

32 lines (21 loc) · 3.08 KB
Raw
layout title nav_order has_children permalink
default
Open Source Contributions
2
true
/Contributions-1-4-Ind

Project Structure and Governance

Similarly diverse is the governance structure of projects, ranging from a single developer-lead model, sometimes also referred to as “Benevolent Dictator for Life” (e.g., the Linux kernel), via company-controlled projects (e.g., Android), to fully meritocracy-based governance models (e.g., OpenStack, Kubernetes). Meritocracy refers to a governance model in which the most valued contributors to a project obtain leadership positions in the project, often based on project-wide elections. Projects controlled by a single company typically lack community-based governance fora such as Technical Steering Committees, and more prominently, all Committers among the developers are employed by the controlling company, thereby gatekeeping all code going into the codebase.

Additionally, the size of the development community is an indicator of the adoption of a project, but not at all a clear cut criterion. Some widely used open source projects are maintained by just a small group of developers, despite being leveraged across countless commercial and non-commercial software. Famous examples are log4j1 or openssl2.

Given all this diversity, organizations and developers who intend to i) utilize and consequently ii) engage in open source must be aware of the nature of the development community and take their respective ways-of-working into account.

Open Source Foundations

Open Source Foundations are non-profit organizations which facilitate the development of open source software projects. Their goal is to establish a neutral space within which organizations – commercial or non-commercial, competing or non-competing – can jointly participate in the development of open source projects. To this end, foundations provide, among others, services such as a

  1. A vendor-neutral and meritocracy-based governance structure to ensure that no single organization steers the technical roadmap of a project and that instead project leadership positions are held by the most active and valued technical contributors,
  2. marketing and event organization to support industry adoption of a project,
  3. development infrastructure such as cloud hosting resources and CI/CD infrastructure, and
  4. dedicated staff for handling project and release management.

Commercial and non-commercial organizations can moreover join a foundation and/or a respective project hosted by a foundation as a member. Membership typically involves a membership fee and depending on the membership level, the member organization receives different benefits, such as a seat on the governing board which oversees how the membership budget is spent.

Examples of open source foundations include the Linux Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the Apache Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and various smaller ones.

Footnotes

  1. Log4j project team{:target="_blank"} ↩

  2. OpenSSL{:target="_blank"} ↩