A little over a month ago we announced the formation of the TODO Group, a group of companies coming together to collaborate on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open source projects and programs. The response we received was overwhelmingly positive, and we’ve been working hard since that time to clarify our goals and objectives as well as determine a path forward that includes as many companies as possible.
Membership
When we made our announcement, the initial members listed were:
In addition to these founding members, we’ve also added representatives from four companies that we’ve been engaged with since we started talking about forming TODO:
With these additions, we have representation from a good cross section of industry leaders in corporate open source.
Community
In addition to these members, we invited any interested companies to participate, and we heard from over 700 companies within the first week. Due to the overwhelming response, we want to be sure we’re extremely clear on our charter and operating principles, and how we are organized. To that end, we created our Twitter account and this blog to better communicate with everyone, and setup a mailing list that companies can use to connect with each other to discuss open source.
We are still working to more clearly define how membership works, and we’ll be sharing those details as soon as we can.
What’s next?
In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more information on this blog. You can look forward to discussions of the legal areas of open source, how to build an open source community, what it takes to manage successful projects, and more. Some of the topics we have in mind include:
- Why run an open source program?
- Policies for launching new projects
- Using external open source projects
- Employee projects on their own time
- Licenses, CLAs & other boilerplates
- Interacting with your communities
- Managing large open source portfolios
- Metrics for success
- The open source project lifecycle
- Open source & corporate identities
- What is the source of truth of truth?
Longer-term, we’ll be spending time curating best practices from our member companies to share with you as well as working directly with GitHub to create better tooling around corporate open source projects.
We’re very excited to get TODO Group up and running, and we look forward to further discussions about open source with the community.
Nicholas C. Zakas, Principal Architect, Box