So you are responsible for some ‘free and open’ project or effort that is in the public interest. This could be free software/open source, open hardware, open science, open content, etcetera. With open, we mean that you are sharing not just the final end result as something immutable, but you’ve made it part of the ‘Commons’ by explicitly allowing anyone to build and extend on what you’ve created. In legal terms this is normally done through a ’license’, and each incremental author actually needs to license his or her part. However, once different people start contributing, managing who can license what becomes cumbersome - especially if you need to make upgrades to a license. Mix in the need to collectively raise funds for promotion, development and maintenance, and you’ve just experienced why people that are involved with larger projects sometimes feel victim to their own success. None of this matters when a project is young, but as soon as it is about to outgrow the original creator it becomes urgent - there is a window of opportunity for quick and effective repair which slowly starts to close once you’ve passed a certain scale, The critical fase of scale up is where we aim to help out.
Keep Your Friends Close — Open Tech Strategies | Blog
One of the insider secrets of free and open source software (FOSS) is that most of the rules a project uses on a day-to-day basis are not found in the software’s license. There are contribution guidelines, which are enforced by the project only taking contributions that meet them. There are codes of conduct, which are a condition of community participation. There are endorsements, official membership, a voice in setting the project roadmap, and all kinds of other benefits that attach to varying types of community participation. In each case, entirely external to the license, there are official rules and unwritten norms that govern how participants gain the benefits of joining the civic life of a project.
How to manage casual contributors to open source projects
Try these strategies to better utilize contributions from your project's episodic volunteers.
Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing | TechCrunch
New alternative category to 'closed source' could help companies monetize software in the open -- without going all-in on open source.
The Missing Middle of Open Source
Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.
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.
Katerina Marchán (@zkat@toot.cat)
Open source maintainers of major projects (hi) are not ready to accept and talk about how the cultural insistence on permissive licensing is just straight up labor exploitation taking advantage of our addiction to popularity (also hi). We’re doing this to ourselves too, you know.
One Startup's Heretical Plan to Turn Open Source Code Into Cash
With a new kind of license, open sourcers are trying to strike a balance between getting paid and preserving their values.
Creating and growing healthy community open source projects [PLoP 2020]
Abstract: This article presents a succinct and minimal handbook of best practices of how to create and grow community open source projects. We start with the assumption that the handbook’s user has…
Everything an open source maintainer might need to know about open source licensing | Ben Balter
There's lots of internet lore around open source licensing. An attorney and open source developer answers the most common questions.
Scaling Open Source communities
Successful Open Source projects must transition from pure volunteerism to include paid contributions, mirroring how public goods like roads evolved historically.
Reimagining OSS Licensing and Commercialization with Fair Source - Adam Jacob, System Initiative
Considerations When Open Sourcing a Project
One of the most frequent questions I receive not only from engineers, but from other lawyers is “we are thinking of making a project available under an open source license – what do we …
Nibble Stew: The Nine Phases of an Open Source Project Maintainer
There is more to running an open source project than writing code. In fact most of all work has to do with something else. This places addit...
It’s time to rethink Open Source
Why developers give away valuable work for free — and what can be done to take that money back.
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.
