A list of useful articles, white papers, tweets (punchlines) and a video to learn and understand open source project management, the difference between a project and products, why people contribute, and other interesting information.

I built this page for I often have to share this kind of resources with my colleagues and managers.

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History

• IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view, by Jon “maddog” Hall on lpi.org (en)
• What Did Sun’s OSPO Do?, by Simon Phipps on meshedinsights.com (en)

Strategy and product management:

• Open source for products in four rules (and 10 slides), by Stephen Walli on opensource.com (en)
• Open Source: From Community to Commercialization, by Peter Levine and Jennifer Li on Andreessen Horowitz’s blog (en)
• Five Surprising Things When Open Sourcing Proprietary Software, by Dave Neary  on Redhat’s blog (en)
• Crafting an Open Source Product Strategy, by Dave Neary on Redhat’s blog (en)
• Balancing Makers and Takers to scale and sustain Open Source, by Dries Buytaert on his blog (en)

Intellectual property:

• Pick a License, Any License, by Jeff Atwood on his blog CoddingHorror (en)
• Open source licenses: What, which, and why, by Jim Salter on ArsTechnica (en)

Governance:

• The Many Faces of the Community Manager, by Dave Neary on Redhat’s blog (en)
• Helping developers engage with community projects, by Dave Neary on Redhat’s blog (en)
• Transparent and Open, by Wayne Beaton on his blog (en)
• Open Source Program Offices: The Primer on Organizational Structures, Roles and Responsibilities, and Challenges, by Ibrahim Haddad on Linkedin (en)
• Contributor covenant, A Code of Conduct for Open Source Communities (en)

E-book:

• Open Source Archetypes: A framework For Purposeful Open Source, by the Mozilla Foundation (PDF, en)
• The Good Governance Initiative Handbook, by the OSPO Alliance (HTML, PDF)
• The Open Source Way 2.0, by various authors from the Open Source Way initiative (HTML, PDF, EPUB, en)

Articles in French:

• En finir avec les 3 mythes sur l’open source, par Qunkai Liu sur Siècle Digital (fr)

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The basics of open source in video:

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Useful punchlines or threads on Twitter

Today's @xkcd is all about why companies choose to pay for #opensource rather than run it themselves.

Turns out that setting up, hardening, optimizing, and running open source components takes skills and resources better spent elsewhere.https://t.co/M2m3UIV2cV

— Tobie Langel (@tobie) July 21, 2022

Yup, of course it is. One of the skill testing questions is: who owns the project’s trademark? I wish more developers understood the implications of the for-profit abuse of that control point. https://t.co/3XNOl2XN5d

— Mike Milinkovich (@mmilinkov) March 11, 2020

I would like to coin Mickos's Law (named after Mårten):
Projects ≠ Products
Project have communities – Communities have time and no money.
Products have customers – Customers have money and no time.

— Stephen Walli (@stephenrwalli) February 3, 2020

Open source is non-rivalrous. Figure out a way to monetize that doesn't set you up in opposition to your community, and people will love you. But if you need to diminish the community in order to be successful, people will treat you as if your product is proprietary.

— VanL (@VanL) August 28, 2019

The best open source strategy doesn't involve controlling a project. It couples the success of your business to the success of the project regardless of who controls it or where it goes.

— Dan Lorenc (@lorenc_dan) October 24, 2019