

Introducing //TODO for companies that are committed to open source - hswolff
https://github.com/blog/1889-introducing-todo-for-companies-that-are-committed-to-open-source

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jamesgpearce
Hey all, I've been part of pulling this initiative together and thought I'd
just put together some of our early thoughts.

The primary purpose is to get the open source program managers from companies
together. It turns out there are a bunch of challenges for companies who want
to run open source projects effectively, and we discovered we had only rarely
even shared our own experiences of doing so - let alone figured out how to
improve things.

A roadmap for the group's work is still to be defined... at this point you
should consider this an invite to get involved. But we imagine some of the
outputs might include things like:

\- shared best practices for running large open source programs well

\- certain criteria or qualities that 'good' projects should aspire to
(responsiveness to community, maintenance, test-coverage, clear licensing,
etc)

\- tooling & instrumentation that makes it easier for companies to reach and
maintain those standards

\- a directory of projects from members that meet some or all of those
criteria

I don't want to imply that we're committing to do all of these, but perhaps
these non-normative examples give a bit more colour to the sort of things
we'll tackle.

If you're at all interested, please sign up. We hope to have a face-to-face
workshop very soon to kick off the work and understand what members want to
prioritize.

~~~
biot
If I'm understanding the intent correctly, it sounds like the home page could
use something like this:

    
    
      "Does your company release open source projects? Would you like to
       improve how you interact with the open source community to better manage
       and run your projects? Join your peers at //TODO and collaborate on 
       practices, tools, and other ways to run a successful and effective open
       source program."

~~~
jamesgpearce
Yes. Maybe this is why we are not in marketing :)

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boucher
After reading this announcement, I have no clue what this is or why my company
might want to join it.

~~~
wmf
Agreed. "What it looks like to release open source projects, how to shift
ownership of projects from companies to the community, and how to make sure
that open source projects remaining healthy and active" has been discussed for
almost 20 years. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they
have something to contribute here, but why not hold the announcement until
they actually say what they're going to say?

~~~
jamesgpearce
For open source in general, we absolutely agree... but company-run projects
aren't always as successful - and yet we feel they can be a valuable part of
the overall open source landscape.

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amateurhuman
Thanks for the comments everyone, hopefully I can answer some of the questions
about what TODO is about and where it's headed, don't miss jamesgpearce's
comments too.

One of the first principles when forming the group was that we wanted to
collaborate with, and learn from, each other before developing prescriptive
guidelines. The ten member companies that launched with TODO are just a
fraction of companies that have open source programs; there are companies in
wide ranging industries like finance, automotive, and retail that have already
expressed interest in participating too. So instead of launching today with
our version of the answers, we wanted to invite dialogue and particiaption.

Many of the participating and interested companies have already written
extensive documentation and internal tools to solve some of the unique
challenges of their open source programs. We want to take that experience,
find the common patterns, and open it up to the broader community.

We believe that the best practices, tooling, and development principles that
will come from the group will improve the overall quality of the projects;
that these projects can be adopted by other companies with certain
expectations.

If these are the same problems you face in your company's open source program,
we'd love to hear from you and have you participate because you can help
define the problems we tackle.

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spb
At first I thought this was going to be a tool that highlights "//TODO:"
comments in code for contributors to hack on in open-source projects.

~~~
davis
At this point, that might be more useful than what it currently is...

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arihant
Okay I'm not sure this is well thought out, at least the sign on procedure is
not. Here is a series of messages they present to the user:

1\. It is for companies with dedicated resources for open source projects.

2\. The person signing on has to mention the company he is with, so ideally a
person from the "dedicated resource" or open source department of a
prospective company?

3\. They exist to discuss "how to shift ownership of projects from companies
to the community".

So as a person of an open source department at their company, one is expected
to join this to help their company render their department useless?

They should bake it better and present it to the right person.

~~~
click170
I kind of read that a bit differently.

First off, we can probably agree that not every corporate open source project
is one that the community expresses an interest in. For those projects without
community interest, this is moot.

For projects that the community does have an interest in, it can easily become
unwieldy for a company to try and lead an open source project for a variety of
reasons. I see it as beneficial to the company and the community for the
community to gradually assume ownership of projects they are interested in.

Even if the community takes the project in a direction the company doesn't
like, the company can always fork, or revert to an earlier version and
continue. It seems like a win-win to me.

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m0nastic
James Pearce (Facebook Open Source Person commenting in here) gave a pretty
interesting talk about Facebook's internal Open Source process at OSCon:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk&list=UUP_lo1MFyx5...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk&list=UUP_lo1MFyx5IXDeD9s_6nUw)

I think things like this are a good way to get companies more aligned with
contributing to open source, even aside from the mammoth technology companies
already involved. I know that for many companies, the decision not to open
source parts of their software isn't based on any idealogical disagreement
with open source, but because their software projects haven't been designed
with open sourcing as a goal, and if they can now take that into account when
starting new projects, I'd expect that you might see a lot more open source
software. So I think an organization that helps foster that can provide a lot
of benefit.

And I'm not even a big open source zealot, but the number of companies who
"get" the fact that participating in open source can be useful for lots of
reasons (many better than "get the community to do work for free for us"),
could certainly stand to be higher.

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zobzu
Interestingly fully-open companies like mozilla aren't in there

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peterbraden
'talking' isn't really a problem that Open Source has. Funding on the other
hand...

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vhost-
I'm surprised this came from Github considering there's nothing even remotely
parsable anywhere.

Maybe it's my (legit) dyslexia, but I can't understand what the hell this is.

Secondly, Walmart labs?

~~~
jamesgpearce
I'm involved & left some thoughts in a neighbouring comment. Also:
[https://github.com/walmartlabs](https://github.com/walmartlabs) :)

~~~
vhost-
Crazy! I had no idea they did stuff like that.

