You could say this is the article I’ve been waiting for. Finally a study examining the formal Foundations in charge of open source projects.
Thanks, Zhensheng Xie!!
The following are excerpts from the research summary which appeared in OSBR.
The research here is valuable to study the role of these Foundations in their own right, and what the influence is of corporations over them. What seems still missing though, is a study of how these governance institutions influence the community of producers themselves.
BOD refers to the Board of Directors of the foundations.
1. Introduction and Definition
“Communities that develop open source software (OSS) are virtual entities on the Internet, not legal entities. Some open source communities establish open source software foundations (OSSF) in order to protect their intellectual property and carry out contractual arrangements. As legal entities, OSSF help communities attain their long-term goals, hold community assets, provide resources to communities, and balance interests amongst different stakeholders.
Typically when an open source community incorporates as an OSSF, they seek to gain financial advantages from donations and tax exemptions. OSSF is a non-profit organization (NPO) with a primary objective to support or to actively engage in activities of public or private interest without any commercial or monetary profit purposes. A NPO is a corporation that can handle business dealings, sign contracts, and own property as any other individual or for-profit corporation. NPOs differ from for-profits in terms of taxes and governance. A NPO’s governance structures preclude private financial gain. OSSF in the US are registered under tax-exempt 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6). 501(c)(6) is reserved for “Business Leagues and groups such as Chambers of Commerce” and is a form of a business network in favour of pursuing members’ own business interests whereas 501(c)(3) organizations provide public benefits. Most OSSF registered in the US are 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations. In the US, both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) NPOs are exempt from most federal income taxes. OSSFs registered outside of the US usually have similar benefits. From a legal perspective, an OSSF is a legacy NPO.
An OSSF must have at least one software project in which individuals are contributing to a new software release. The Apache Software Foundation is an OSSF while the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is not as it focuses on standards and does not hold any software projects.”
2. Governance Typology
“Governance refers to the overall processes and structures used to direct and manage an organization’s operations and activities. Three aspects of governance were the focus of our research: i) governance structure; ii) activities of the Board of Directors (BOD); and iii) occupations of the members of the BOD.
Most of the sample OSSF are membership based NPOs with the elected BOD bearing the major responsibilities for the organization. Members of the OSSF can be either a merit member or a sponsor member. An individual becomes a merit member after being recognized as making non-trivial contributions to the foundation. A sponsor member is a company that donates resources, such as money and developers, and in return is admitted as a member of the foundation. Typically, individuals are merit members, organizations are sponsor members, and employees of organizations represent sponsor members.
Based on “the extent to which the sponsor members can participate in the decision making of OSSF”, we found three types of OSSF governance structures:
1. Merit: all members are merit members with full voting rights.
2. Merit dominated: merit members are in a majority and it is difficult for sponsor members as a group to affect outcomes.
3. Sponsor dominated: sponsor members are in a majority and may be classified into tiers where the size of the payment determines tier membership. Merit members typically work for a company or research centre.
The ASF, SPI, and the Plone Foundation are merit type foundations. The GNOME Foundation and the Python Software Foundation are Merit dominated. The Eclipse Foundation is sponsor dominated.
OSSF governance is comprised of five dimensions.
The first dimension focuses on how much effort the BOD spends on strategic planning and common vision development. The second and third dimensions relate to the composition of the BOD: i) members who have a reputation in the OSS community and ii) members with a background in engineering and science. The fourth dimension deals with power, specifically the power the BOD has over timing and content of the roadmap and software releases and the power of sponsor members. Finally, the fifth dimension focuses on sponsor members’ ability to participate in decision-making
Twelve categories of governance activities were defined as being carried out by the BODs of OSSF.
The twelve activity categories are: i) strategic planning and common vision development; ii) development of policy and guidelines; iii) project governance; iv) financial governance; v) primary resources governance; vi) human resources governance; vii) fund-raising; viii) external relation management; ix) BOD self development; x) governance structure management; xi) community development; and xii) conference governance. . ”
3. More Information
Read the details and conclusions here.