Open Source Projects - Beyond Code

5

Governance and Hosting Models

If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.

- Winston S. Churchill

It’s always interesting to speak of governance alongside open source if we recall from Chapter 1, The Whats and Whys of Open Source, the ethos of open source coming from hacker communities that saw problems in the existing methods of producing and using software. You might call them a bit counter-culture, which is a characteristic that stuck with the free and open source software communities for several years of their existence.

But over time, you quickly realize that having models for getting things done is key to long-term success and sustainability. This has been part of our human history for centuries. The Code of Hammurabi ...