When to Move a Project to an Open Source Foundation
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Join For FreeLast week I had the opportunity to attend and speak at OSCON, the annual gathering of open source people. This year I spoke in two sessions about open source foundations: 1) a tutorial called Community Foundation 101 and 2) a session that introduced 6 of the larger foss foundations.
The Foundation 101 tutorial was a great discussion about why and how you might start your own foundation or move your project to an existing foundation. There was a lot of discussion, instead of slides, but a number of people helped keep some great notes.
One question that came up a number of times was ‘When should I consider moving my project to a Foundation?’. Of course the answer is always dependent on the project but I think there are a couple of general scenarios:
1. An individual developer has created an open source project and it starts to become successful. Based on the success, the developer is looking for a ‘legal’ home to own the IP so others can easily participate.
2. A company has been sponsoring an open source project that begins to become successful. Other companies might want to contribute to the project but require a level playing field in terms of IP ownership and governance. Open Source Foundation provide a great vendor-neutral home for these types of projects.
Either way, I see a growing interest in using open source foundations for hosting open source projects that will make a difference in the industry. There are lots of great foundations already in existence and some news ones are being started. Based on the feedback I received at OSCON, I think Eclipse is very well suited as being the home for many successful open source projects.
btw, I also did a presentation at OSBC that provides a good overview on why open governance matters and the differences between some of the foundations, including Eclipse, Apache, Outercurve, Software Conservatory and SPI.
Published at DZone with permission of Ian Skerrett, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
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