Slides from our presentation at the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit in Lake Tahoe 2017.

1. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Running a Successful
Open Source Project
Wayne Beaton,
Gunnar Wagenknecht

2. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Who we are and why we are here!
Wayne Beaton
@waynebeaton
Director of Open Source Projects
Eclipse Foundation
Gunnar Wagenknecht
@guw
Principal Member Technical Staff,
Salesforce

3. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Define “Successful”

4. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Understand Open Source
(at least a little)

5. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
A Typical OSS
Project
Is there such a thing?
Transparency
Openness
Meritocracy
Vendor Neutrality
Code and Documentation
Rules
...

6. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
People!
Community Roles
Owners
Leaders
Developers/Committers
Contributors
Community Members
… and more

7. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Outreach
Brand
Culture
(Moral) Support
…
The values of
communities
Or why do we have them?

8. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Open Source
Foundations
Why move your project to a
Foundation?
Vendor neutrality
Governance model
Resources and Services
Marketing
...

9. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Build Your Community

10. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0 Image, CC BY 2.0
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jakerust/16811692146/

11. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Facilitate Success
● Establish participation rules
● Operate transparently
● Be open to new ideas
● Make building easy
● Make reporting issues easy; respond
● Lower barriers
Stop asking “where’s the patch”
with a snarky tone.

12. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Listen
Image, CC BY-SA 2.0
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alanstanton/14712867237/
Don’t use Twitter to
report bugs. Just Don’t.

13. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Conferences
Image, CC BY-SA 2.0
https://www.flickr.com/photos/33725200@N00/7018540027/

14. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0Participate in discussions Image, CC BY-SA 2.0
https://www.flickr.com/photos/33725200@N00/416219171/

15. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Contribute Code

16. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Code
… is about more than code
Bug fixes, new functionality
Coding conventions
License
Intellectual property, copyright
3rd party libraries
...

17. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Select your license…
… carefully.

18. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Manage Copyright
● Who owns the code?
○ The owner may be the author’s employer (check your contract)
○ Do you assign ownership when you contribute?
● The project itself is likely not a legal entity
● State the license (use SPDX code)
/*******************************************************************************
* Copyright (c) 2017 The Eclipse Foundation, and others.
* All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
* are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
* which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
* http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-1.0
*
* Contributors:
* Wayne Beaton - initial API and implementation
*******************************************************************************/

19. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Establish Guides and Conventions
● Put a Contribution guide in your repository
● Coding conventions
● Source code formatting
● Patch size
● Unit tests
● Code comments
● Separate commits/changes (avoid fixing B while working on A)
● Communication & expectations

20. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Track Intellectual Property
● How is the project code licensed?
● Who owns the code you wrote?
● Are you allowed to contribute?
● Are you allowed to (re-) license the code you are submitting?
● Use a Contributor (License) Agreement (CLA/CA)?
● Define an intellectual property management process
● What about third party content?

21. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Intellectual Property Due Diligence is Hard Work
● License
○ Are the licenses in the contribution compatible with the project license?
● Provenance
○ Did the people who claim to have authored the code actually author the code?
● Integrity
○ Are the license statements valid?
○ Has the license changed?
○ Has code been inappropriately copied?

22. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Require a Contributor Agreement/Certificate of
OriginGenerally some combination of:
● The contributor wrote the code
● Contributor has necessary rights to submit the code
● Provided under the terms of the project license
● A public record of the contribution is maintained indefinitely

23. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Protect Your Trademark
● Who owns the project/product name?
● Should you register a trademark?
● Foundations hold the name on behalf of the community
○ Prevent any single vendor/individual from dominating the project
● Trademark usage guidelines
● Leverage the brand/grow the value of the brand

24. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
What we Didn’t Talk About
● Testing
● Support (end user vs. adopter vs. internal)
● Business drivers for getting involved
● Diversity and longevity

25. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Why should you care about all of this?

26. Copyright ⓒ 2016, 2017 The Eclipse Foundation and Salesforce.
Made available under the CC-BY-3.0
Thank you!