All the power of open source comes from throwing in with your neighbors, even the neighbors you don't like very much. For most projects, the main reason to get involved in open source is to create productive relations with as many participants as possible, including rivals. Doing this well requires understanding who is in your ecosystem and how they relate to each other.
Mapping Your Ecosystem (and Its Saboteurs)
Naming everyone in your open-source ecosystem—both competitors and colleagues—and following where value flows.
Open Source infrastructure deserves a business model
Open Source infrastructure is essential, invisible, and chronically underfunded. A more sustainable approach may be to connect the cost of running that infrastructure to the organizations that rely on it most.
Balancing Makers and Takers to scale and sustain Open Source
To scale and sustain Open Source ecosystems in a more efficient and fair manner, Open Source projects need to embrace new governance, coordination and incentive models.
About | Open Source Ecology
The mission of Open Source Ecology (OSE) is to create the open source economy. An open source, libre economy is an efficient economy which increases innovation by open collaboration. To get there, OSE is currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker.
Open Source Explained — Open Indie
Musings on the concept of ‘open source’, in the broadest possible definition of the term. Also an invitation to become a participant in ...
The shape of open source
At its core, open source is about collaboration. Whether it’s version control, licenses, or issue trackers—everything exists to support people working with each other. Open source embodies a model for…
Why open source: 25 reasons to embrace it | Ben Balter
Open source isn't a fad. Here are twenty-five economic, moral, and personal reasons your organization should embrace it.
Open Source Initiative
The steward of the Open Source Definition, setting the foundation for the Open Source Software ecosystem.
Open source engagement in organizations
Companies, governments, and other organizations big and small are working with open source to achieve their goals. Teams range from barely considering it to ...
Fueling Open Source with Vibes & Money
Economists think Open Source is a business model. Devs know better, and fund it accordingly.
Open source and the software supply chain
Managing something as esoteric as resources for building software with a variety of contributions made by the open source community is more amorphic.
Setting an Open Source Strategy
The majority of companies that use open source understand its business value and identify its advantages in efficiency, flexibility, interoperability, and speed of innovation. Yet only half of these companies report practicing basic open source management, such as community development, code maintenance, and the like, according to the latest Future of Open Source survey.
What Is Open Source Strategy? — Open Tech Strategies | Blog
There is a lot of documentation out there on how to do open source well at the project level. Historically, many projects have been started by developers, often on their own initiative, and the first non-technical questions they faced tended to be about project coordination (like "What collaboration tools shall we use?" or "What will our code review practices be?") and about community management (like "How do we decide who has commit access?" and "How do we integrate newcomers smoothly?"). Because developers hate to solve the same problems over and over, there is a wealth of detailed and varied material addressing those sorts of questions (we've even written some ourselves, but it's just a drop in the bucket of what's available). Taken together, this literature thoroughly answers the question "How do we execute the best tactics for developing open source software?"
Moving beyond the charity framework
A healthy ecosystem for supporting open source in the long term.
