Category: 1.4 Open Source Foundations

I’m very much interested in the governance of open source projects, in particular if these are user-led projects. With this post, I’m proposing a basic terminology to talk about the formal organizational structure underlying the governance of such open source projects. As the following two lists show, there are only three basic situations. First, there…

The most important long-term trend, and my number #3 for the foreseeable future, is the sponsorship and management of open source software development by users, not vendors. The trend towards ubiquitous digitization is leading users of software to take their software fate into their own hands, establishing informal communities or incorporating as non-profit user consortia…

We are researching the governance of open source software foundations. We are specifically interested in what we call open source user consortia, that is, open source foundations where the users of the software are in the driver’s seat. A primary example would be Kuali, which hosts the development of software for academic institutions. A more…

An open source software user consortium is a non-profit organization (foundation, consortium, working group) created for the purpose of funding and managing the development of non-differentiating open source software made available to foundation members and the general public. Its purpose is to establish a software ecosystem in which vendors and suppliers can provide products and…