The topic of good governance for open source projects is something I think is really important for the long-term success of any open source project. In an effort to describe some of the best practices, I have written a guest blog post for the Open Source Delivers blog.
For a quick summary, the key points I see for good open source project governance are:
- Complete transparency: Make sure all the key rules and processes are written down
- Vendor neutrality: No one entity should have special status or decision making capability
- Appeal to multiple stakeholders: Healthy open source projects have multiple stakeholders, so the governance needs to have a representation for each stakeholder
- Separation of Church and State: Project development decisions need to be made by project committers not a ‘higher’ authority
Check out the details on the Open Source Delivers blog. Let me know if I have missed something or what you think.
