Open Source Citizenship
summary
Research from interviews with corporate open source program leads and project maintainers maps what companies actually do—hiring paid committers at Google and Salesforce, running mentorships like Google Summer of Code and Outreachy, and funding projects with recurring $10,000 grants via platforms such as Open Collective. Communities ask for designers, technical writers, QA, infrastructure, event space, paid maintainer positions, clearer contributor docs and licensing, and employer IP contract fixes (Software Freedom Conservancy’s contract patch program). Concrete asks and funding pathways determine whether corporate support succeeds.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:12Open Source Citizenship
- 1:44Roads and Bridges
- 5:43upstream contributions
- 10:18volunteer design, UI/UX, product management, technical writing, data science, and marketing/PR
- 12:25contribute beyond what you need
- 14:33testing and QA resources
- 15:05'fund conference travel for contributors
- 17:04open source friendly contracts for employees who contribute to open source
- 20:26jobs for maintainers and contributors when heavily relying on their work
- 22:21encourage universities to give students credit for contributing to FLOSS
- 24:23abide by community norms
- 40:16be prepared to onboard, new contributors
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