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Thoughts on F/OSS (10/10): governance

This is part of a 10 blog posts series on F/OSS thoughts, extracted from a talk that I gave recently.

Yes, "governance" is a word that sounds so boring. Opensource is all about fun, right?

Well, you still need to think about it, even if your project does not define a formal 10 pages long governance processes document. Quickly, there are the main few things that you should think about on the governance of your project.

First of all, you need to be able to categorize the people that gravitate around the project and the roles they have. Especially, you will need rules and processes for people to become commiters to your project.

The spontaneous free love / free participation vision of F/OSS theoricians does not work in practice, so there need to be rules, even simple, just to make sure that a coherent vision and set of values are maintained.

Intellectual property is important. Especially, one important question is to know if developers and contributors give their copyright away to you, if they share it with you, or if they keep it for themselves. This is less important with liberal licenses though.

You may also need to balance patents (which are evil) and trademarks (which are okay). Don't be surprised though if some F/OSS fanatics do not understand the rationale behind having trademarks and make silly things

This post marks the end of this 10 blog posts series on F/OSS thoughts. I hope you enjoyed it, and gathered some useful bits along the way

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on F/OSS (6/10): 4 tips for managing a project
2. Thoughts on F/OSS (3/10): main business models
3. Thoughts on F/OSS (4/10): steps of your project
4. Thoughts on F/OSS (8/10): dealing with success
5. Thoughts on F/OSS (1/10): quick facts