The most widely adopted code of conduct in open source. Stewarded by the Organization for Ethical Source.
What We Believe
The Organization for Ethical Source is a global, multidisciplinary community devoted to centering justice, equity, and human rights in the practice of open source.
Ethical Source: Open Source, Evolved.
The Organization for Ethical Source is a global, multidisciplinary community devoted to centering justice, equity, and human rights in the practice of open source.
A method for giving credit to organizations that contribute code to Open Source
By tracking organizational contributions in Git commits, we can give organizations more tangible reasons to fund open source and help sustain it over time.
Open Source Software and Corporate Influence — Andrew Lilley Brinker
Open source software projects are frequently enmeshed with the interests of corporations. We should update mental models of who works on open source accordingly, and build or modify power structures to be more resilient to corporate capture.
Open Source Resistance
A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …
The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
The open source movement runs on the heroic efforts of not enough people doing too much work. They need help.
Home - Open Source Collective
Open Source Collective is a non-profit fiscal host for open source projects. Get Transparent fundraising, money management, and legal representation
Open Source Initiative
The steward of the Open Source Definition, setting the foundation for the Open Source Software ecosystem.
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.
Permissive-Washing in the Open AI Supply Chain: A Large-Scale Audit of License Integrity
Permissive licenses like MIT, Apache-2.0, and BSD-3-Clause dominate open-source AI, signaling that artifacts like models, datasets, and code can be freely used, modified, and redistributed. However, these licenses carry mandatory requirements: include the full license text, provide a copyright notice, and preserve upstream attribution, that remain unverified at scale. Failure to meet these conditions can place reuse outside the scope of the license, effectively leaving AI artifacts under default copyright for those uses and exposing downstream users to litigation. We call this phenomenon ``permissive washing'': labeling AI artifacts as free to use, while omitting the legal documentation required to make that label actionable. To assess how widespread permissive washing is in the AI supply chain, we empirically audit 124,278 dataset $\rightarrow$ model $\rightarrow$ application supply chains, spanning 3,338 datasets, 6,664 models, and 28,516 applications across Hugging Face and GitHub. We find that an astonishing 96.5\% of datasets and 95.8\% of models lack the required license text, only 2.3\% of datasets and 3.2\% of models satisfy both license text and copyright requirements, and even when upstream artifacts provide complete licensing evidence, attribution rarely propagates downstream: only 27.59\% of models preserve compliant dataset notices and only 5.75\% of applications preserve compliant model notices (with just 6.38\% preserving any linked upstream notice). Practitioners cannot assume permissive labels confer the rights they claim: license files and notices, not metadata, are the source of legal truth. To support future research, we release our full audit dataset and reproducible pipeline.
Software Stewardship Lab
A non-profit research lab dedicated to ensuring the stability of the Open Source ecosystem we all rely on.
Tyranny of Permissionlessness
open source’s narrow focus further empowers those with other ways to exclude
