alt Hacker NewsHow easy do you have to make it to contribute to be considered “open source”. Obviously, no project accepts every single pull request. Where is the line between “open source” and “no open source” in your definition?
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Intent. Do you intent to be a genuinely open community and is it set up around fostering that dynamic as a central aspect of development? It's hard to measure intent, but we can do so indirectly by looking at the project structure:
- Are there contributor guidelines?
- Do contributors have to sign a waiver before they can contribute any code?
- Is there a RFC process?
- Does the project actually respond meaningfully to that feedback, or does it simply get filed in the special complaints folder for corporate.
- Does the project encourage outside contributions in more than a cursory way?
- Does the CLA grant the company unilateral relicensing rights?
- Are governance documents public?
- Can the community vote on decisions?
- Does the community have a say in how it's moderated?
- Are community members invited to actually join the organization?
- Are architectural decisions made in open meetings?
- Is there a public ROADMAP and is the community invited to contribute to it or influence it?
- Can others build competing distributions without fear of retaliation?
- Can the project be forked if there is community disagreement about direction?
Those are just some signals off the top of my head. There's no bright line; the presence or absence of a few won't say anything one way or another. But if many of the answers to those questions are leaning toward the negative, then I don't think it can be open source.
The line is where I find and fix a bug and upstream is behind a curtain.