FOSS Sustainability
Overview of FOSS/Open Source Sustainability and Pay The Maintainers movements.
Discussing open source sustainability with any four people will quickly bring up a dozen different conversations, based on how each person is related to open source. To keep conversations productive, it helps to define what aspects of sustainability you’re considering.
Even if we confine sustainability to just “common open source projects”, the important points may be very different for someone working in a software company, versus lone maintainers, versus academics, or anyone else. This site offers context to discussions with a framework of major aspects to consider.
Sustainability Aspects
Each of these constituencies has their own needs and abilities to effect change; they also often have different vocabularies for talking about the issues. Review a few of these groups, and see what commonalities are there if we could only more easily translate the vocabularies. These span the perspective from the average computer user, to the entire ecosystem of computing. The specific goals here are for improving social, financial, and software ecosystem sustainability of all the people who build the open source software running computers worldwide.
- Commercial Companies - Commercial companies outside of the software space.
- Contributors - Contributors volunteer their efforts directly to a project.
- The Software Ecosystem - The entire ecosystem of human computing.
- Educational Institutions - Colleges, universities, and any schools that teach software-related skills of any kind.
- FOSS Foundations - Non-profit foundations providing services to affiliated projects.
- Governments - Governments set legislative policies, provide grants, and are often major software users.
- Maintainers - Maintainers are individuals in charge of a software project.
- Project Management Committees - PMCs are communities of volunteers in charge of a FOSS project.
- Software Projects - A single open source software project or product.
- Software Companies - Commercial entities building software products.
- Standards Bodies - Non-governmental organizations create and maintain technical standards and more.
- Software users - Users who are aware of some of the open source projects they use.
Relationships Between Aspects
All aspects by Vocabulary | Timescale | Scope | Relationship
Vocabulary
What kinds of vocabulary or taxonomy that are most effective when working with these kinds of groups.
Corporate
Policy
- Commercial Companies
- Contributors
- Educational Institutions
- Governments
- Software Companies
- Standards Bodies
Risk
Education
Research
Community
Governance
Legal
Technical
Standards
Individual
Simple
Timescale
Timescale typically needed to create significant behavior change in this group.
Long
- Commercial Companies
- The Software Ecosystem
- Educational Institutions
- Governments
- Standards Bodies
- Software users
Immediate
Moderate
Quickly
Short
Scope
How broad an effect changes in behavior that one member of this group may have.
Medium
Very small
Large
Small
Relationship
Other groups or aspects this group directly connects to/is similar to/often considers in their work.