Don’t Miss These Free Guides to Running a Successful Open Source Program

At organizations of all types, launching and maintaining successful open source programs has become a business priority. A strong open source program office helps to ensure that open source is supported, nurtured, shared, explained, and leveraged. With such an office, organizations can establish and execute on their open source strategies in clear terms.

With all this in mind, The Linux Foundation and The TODO Group (Talk Openly Develop Openly) have published a free collection of detailed open source guides to aid companies developing open source programs. The guides are available to you now, and this is the first in a series of articles that can introduce you to the value of the guides.

How to Create an Open Source Program is the first of the guides, and it explores everything from the role of the open source program office to how successful open source programs at companies like Google function. The guide also includes insights and advice from open source experts, including John Mark Walker, Founder of the Open Source Entrepreneur Network, and Will Norris, Open Source Office Manager at Google.

“The open source program office is an essential part of any modern company with a reasonably ambitious plan to influence various sectors of software ecosystems,” notes Walker, in the guide. “If a company wants to increase its influence, clarify its open source messaging, maximize the clout of its projects, or increase the efficiency of its product development, a multifaceted approach to open source programs is essential.”

The How to Create an Open Source Program guide makes clear that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to creating a successful program. In fact, Google’s Norris notes that stakeholders from individual business units play a key role in how open source projects advance at Google.

“We allow the various business units around the company to make the decision on whether it makes sense to open source a given project from a business perspective, because there’s a lot of different reasons why you might open source a project or a piece of code,” he notes. “We’re comfortable with allowing projects to take the approach that works for them given their goals. We play more of a role of facilitating and advising.”

The first guide lays out recommendations for how to include stakeholders ranging from Legal to Engineering in the maintenance of a program office. It also delves into the importance of setting clear program policies and observing compliance guidelines.

“Having a well-defined policy in place, that’s great, but it’s got to be a well-defined minimal policy,” said Jeff Mcaffer, director of the Open Source Programs Office at Microsoft, who was interviewed for the first guide. “Otherwise you get lawyers, security folks, business folks, all piling in their concerns and constraints. Soon you end up with a straitjacket full of policy that basically means that nobody can do anything.”

These free guides are extremely valuable for any organization setting up an open source program. Notably, the guides were not produced in a vacuum. Far from it. The advice you will find in them grew organically out of many interviews with some of the world’s leading open source experts. We strongly encourage you to check out the guides, and stay tuned to this space for more articles in this series.