How To FOSS

This book was compiled during an Independent Study course at Rochester Institute of Technology, in conjunction with the MAGIC Center. In it, you will find a collection of information that explain how to get started in the free and open source community.

Authors

Daniel Jost and Colden Cullen have worked together on nearly every project throughout their years at RIT. After taking the Advanced FOSS course taught by Remy DeCausemaker, they decided to obtain the Free and Open Source Software & Free Culture minor in their final semester, and they will be the first two students to graduate with this qualification. This book fulfills a portion of the minor, and will act as a curriculum for future FOSS classes.

Daniel Jost has always been interested in how things work. Whether it was doing Public Relations for game mods like Conflict Earth 2142, modifying the stylesheets of various websites, or majoring in Game Design & Development at RIT, Daniel lives with the engineer's mantra to be curious. He has accepted a full-time position at Microsoft where he will be working with web technology.

Colden Cullen loves building stuff. He grew up having built practically every Star Wars Lego set created. As soon as he discovered code however, he was hooked. Now, he's relatively well known in the D language community, especially in the game development circles, and is the Lead Engine Programmer on Circular Studios' Dash Engine. Colden has accepted a full-time position at Amazon where he will be working in the Video Games division.

Contributing

We would be happy to review any changes or additions you suggest. If you are new to Github and open source contributions, check out the section about hosting code on Github for an example on how to modify this book.

If you successfully submit a pull request, Travis CI should automatically update the web version the book after a few minutes.

Building Locally

mdBook requires Rust to be installed.

To install Rust, Download the installation file for Windows (x86-64bit) or use the following command for macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

To install mdBook:

cargo install mdbook

To clone and build the book:

cd HowToFOSS
mdbook build

This builds an HTML version of the book. You can also build other formats using mdbook-pdf, mdbook-epub, or other third party plugins for mdBook.

License

All guidance, best practices, and case-studies are under Free/Open Source Licenses. The content is formatted by mdBook.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

What is Open Source? Why? FOSS, Wat?

What does open source mean?

An open source project is a project where a few conditions are met:

1. The code is available to download, for free
2. The code is legally usable by others (see chapter 2)
3. Contributions from external programmers are accepted (and encouraged)

Why should I open source my project?

The idea behind open sourcing a project is that by allowing the public to view and use your code, you gain a few things. In their article title So You’ve Decided To Open-Source A Project At Work. What Now?, Smashing Magazine lists the following advantages:

1. Technical brand: Companies want to be known as a place where smart people work. One excellent way to show this is by releasing code that has been written at the company. Doing so creates mindshare in the community, familiarity with the company and its contributions, and fodder for future technical brand initiatives (such as giving talks at meetups and conferences).
2. Recruiting: Time and again, you’ll see contributors joining companies that sponsor open-source projects. I saw this happen frequently while at Yahoo, where YUI contributors would sometimes end up as Yahoo employees after having contributed to the project on an ongoing basis. Similar hires have occurred in the Node.js community. The reason is pretty clear: If you work on an open-source project in your spare time, imagine how great it would be to turn that hobby into a job. Additionally, allowing job candidates to see some of the company’s code gives some good insight into what working at the company would be like.
3. Giving back: A lot of companies benefit from open-source software, and contributing open-source software back into the world is a way of giving back. These days, it’s part of what it means to be involved in the technical community. When you receive, find a way to give back. A lot of companies are embracing this philosophy.

Why should I contribute to an open source project?

1. Visibility: If you're looking for a job, companies look to see what you're capable of. A great way to see what you're capable of is to see what you've done. Having code in a well known open source project is a great way to show that you know how to write good code, and a great way to get your name out there.
2. You'll learn a ton: Chances are, you don't know everything. Chances are, if you contribute to a project like Node.js, there will be other people contributing, many of whom will be smarter than you are. Being able to see and work with code written by more experienced engineers is a great way to learn a ton, and to get much better at what you do.
3. Bragging Rights: How many people can say that they have written code in Node.js? Not many (552 at the time of writing). Being able to say that you're one of the proud few to be a contributor to a project that people have heard of is a pretty cool thing.

Licensing Overview and Resources

First, the standard disclaimer: This book is not a lawyer, and this does not constitute legal or financial advice.

Licenses are a critical component of any open source project. The license dictates how the project can be used and contributed to by others, and neglecting to include a license does not mean you are putting your code in the public domain. Paul Rubens explains,

As an independent developer you are under no obligation to use any license at all, but that may have unintended consequences. That's because many people believe that by providing no licensing terms they are releasing it into the public domain. In fact, the reverse turns out to be the case: If you release your code without any license then it is automatically copyrighted. That means that no-one can reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from it.

Common FOSS Licenses

ChooseALicense.com and the Open Source Initiative are good places to help you choose what license works best for your project.

MIT - "I want it simple and permissive."

The MIT License is a permissive license that is short and to the point. It lets people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable.

jQuery and Rails use the MIT License.

Apache - "I'm concerned about patents."

The Apache License is a permissive license similar to the MIT License, but also provides an express grant of patent rights from contributors to users.

Apache, SVN, and NuGet use the Apache License. - "I care about sharing improvements."

GPL

The GPL (V2 or V3) is a copyleft license that requires anyone who distributes your code or a derivative work to make the source available under the same terms. V3 is similar to V2, but further restricts use in hardware that forbids software alterations.

Linux, Git, and WordPress use the GPL.

Creative Commons - "I have some creative work that isn't code."

Every license helps creators — we call them licensors if they use our tools — retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially. Every Creative Commons license also ensures licensors get the credit for their work they deserve.

This book and Wikipedia use Creative Commons.

If you have any questions about which license to pick, there are some mailing lists that may help you with your specific situation:

• licensing@fsf.org
• help@softwarefreedom.org
• license-discuss@opensource.org

References

1. https://github.com/jbrambleDC/Twitter-NLPMaps/issues/1

Case Studies

• Dash

Dash

What Is Dash?

Dash is a free and open source 3D game engine. The following is a summation of the full history of Dash.

What started as an engine that Colden made for a class became Dash over a year and a half of taking on more developers and iterating on the components.

As the team approached the end of the Fall 2013 semester there were mixed feelings about the engine. On the one hand we were happy with our accomplishments, but there were serious concerns around maintainability and scalability.

Colden and Eric drew the D language out of a hat for a CS course during the fall. They quickly fell in love with the language, and were excited to sell the team on using it to do a full rewrite using D. A rewrite would also rid the engine of the bloat that had been building up over the last year and give a renewed focus on what the engine could be.

But what should Dash be? At first we thought it should be a résumé piece, but that seemed too short-sighted. Some sort of undergraduate capstone project to show the school administration they should provide a more legitimate offering for large projects? Yes, but that's no way to focus an engine. A way to show game developers that C++ has competition? Definitely! What about giving back to the open source community? Absolutely, the sharing of knowledge is the only reason any of us got to where we are now. And what have XNA/Monogame been up to since we started working on this? We could push the programmer-facing game engine aspect forward by providing modern features that can fill the gap between Monogame and Unity. Now we're talking.

Content Outline

• That time a guy tried to pay Tyler in Bitcoin (like $50) for help
• Imagine RIT
• Meeting Andrei at GDC
• NCrashed and Munrek
  • First contact was March 29, 2014 in Gitter
  • Linux support
  • New logger (dlogg)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_%28game_engine%29

Game Developers Conference 2014

Leading up to GDC we had been hoping to get a demo of Spectral done so we could film it and show off our progress. However, like normal developers we could not go with Plan A, so we used Plan B: talking. As it turns out, that's all we really had the ability to do in most of our conversations anyway. From Daniel's retrospective:

We had deep discussions with Epic, Crytek, and Marmalade about our Dash engine, resulting in great advice and great contacts. All of us spoke with numerous industry developers that were excited to hear from us and expressed interest in hearing from us going forward.

Looking back on it the one thing those of us who went will remember is getting to meet with Andrei Alexandrescu, the co-creator of the D language.

The meeting went by in a blur. We went in with some prepared questions and topics relating to D and our engine, but in the couple hours we talked neither subject hardly came up. Instead we had an honest and exciting discussion about our future, working in the games industry vs. general software engineering, and random life stuff. Eric left with a full-time interview at Facebook and Colden, Brandon, and I have the same opportunity once we look for full-time jobs.

You can read about Daniel's time at GDC or Colden's thoughts on the people we talked to.

The first public launch

Now, of course, the project had been developed in the open and was technically public. But as we neared the end of the semester (May 2014) we thought it would be cool to share Dash around as 0.9.0 shipped. The team thought we had enough features to make people interested and we wanted to gather feedback about what the larger public thought we should focus on in future releases.

When we began sharing it we didn't know what to expect. We ended up getting a heck of a lot more attention than we had even dreamed of. We were at the top of /r/programming for half a day, ranked well in /r/gamedev, had 3 pages of dicussion on the D forums, and the Github repo was viewed thousands of times. In fact, we were viewed so much we were rank 22 in the Trending section of Github. I wish I had concrete stats, but I know we gained over 100 stars on Github and 200 likes on Facebook. A week later we even caught wind of some Japanese conversation on Twitter. We even had a number of people start following our chat room on Gitter.

We had a a number of things that helped enable our success. We put the Facebook page up a couple weeks ahead of the launch so that it already had a small following and would look more legitimate to newcomers. We had created a landing page for Circular Studios with brief explanations of Dash and Spectral that linked to places like the Github. The website was hosted on Amazon S3, so the wave of traffic didn't slow it down or bring it down entirely. We had the larger points of being the first 3D engine in the D language and being one of a handful of FOSS-licensed game engines helping us out as well.

Why Open Source?

Dash went the open source route for a number of the same reasons that many projects choose to open source: increased visibility, giving to / getting support from like-minded developers, and better project management. Keep in mind this wasn't an overnight decision: Dash developers come from the land of game development, which has a pretty bad track record with open source, and we were no exception. The prior iterations of Dash had been closed, both because we hadn't been introduced to the idea of open source development and because the engine was so closely tied to whatever game was being worked at the time that the code repositories were inseparable.

When we decided to rebuild the engine in D and make it open source, it was also decided that we should have a game team developing a game alongside the engine. This has a number of benefits that are covered here, but one thing to point out is that the game was kept closed source. This is important to bring up: not all projects are better as open source projects. Games haven't really figured out how to be open source and commercially successful (not to discount modding). Code is one thing, but art assets and game design documents are not built to be shared for free, publicly. That is not to say we did not take advantage of GitHub's issues, pull requests, and open source-style development. And we are talking about open sourcing the project if we move on without the intention to make profit.

All that to say, evaluate your project's needs upfront and decide if open source makes the most sense. By reading this book you are better informing yourself of the option to open source and the benefits it brings to a project.

References

1. Dash Engine History
2. The Vision of Circular Studios, Fall 2014
3. GDC 2014: Post-Mortem
4. GDC 2014: Who We Talked To

How to Contribute to an Open Source Project

So you've found that sweet open source project that you want to get involved with. Now what? The first thing you should do is look for that project's guide on how to get started with contributing. Often, this will be in a file called CONTRIBUTING, or on the project's wiki. These guides will often explain everything you need to know about how the project management team expects people to work. Things often covered include how to build and test the project, how to submit patches, and what communication channels to pay attention to. Node.js has a great contributing guide if you'd like to see an example of what these files often contain.

If the project you'd like to contribute to doesn't have such a guide, it's not that big of a deal. It probably just means that the project hasn't seen that many external contributors, or that it just uses a very standard workflow. If the project is hosted on GitHub or BitBucket, chances are the project uses GitHub Flow for code contributions. This guide by GitHub has a pretty good description of how the process works. The project probably uses GitHub Issues as an issue tracker, which is a very easy to use system.

Alright, so you've read the guide, and figured out how the project works, and you're ready to start making a difference. Where do you start? The easiest way to join the community is by filing and commenting on issues. The first step of fixing a problem is making sure it's known. Filing good, descriptive issues is extremely helpful to the project maintainers, as it tells them where they should be focusing their efforts. Keeping track of and reviewing pull requests is another great way to get involved. It helps you stay up to date with what's happening with the project, and who knows, maybe you'll spot the next project-breaking typo that slipped past everyone else.

Another great way to ease your way into a project is by doing some repository cleanup. This can include updating documentation, making sure code fits the project's standards, or making the readme prettier. All of these are tasks that are very important, but often project contributors won't take the time to do them themselves.

Once you've settled into working with the project's community, it may finally be time to start writing code. This can be a daunting task; submitting your first patch is definitely a scary thing to undertake. When deciding what to tackle first, it's probably best to start with something relatively simple that has already been documented to increase your chances of having the patch accepted. The simple the changes, and the easier your code is to read, the more likely it is that someone will review it quickly, and merge it. The patch is also more likely to be accepted if it solves an issue that people are already looking out for.

How to Manage a FOSS Project

This effort is aided by the fact that people generally show up expecting and looking for social norms. That's just how humans are built. In any group unified by a common endeavor, people who join instinctively search for behaviors that will mark them as part of the group. The goal of setting precedents early is to make those "in-group" behaviors be ones that are useful to the project; once established, they will be largely self-perpetuating.

Setting the Tone

• Avoid Private Discussions
• Nip Rudeness in the Bud
• Practice Conspicuous Code Review
• Be Open From Day One
• When Opening a Formerly Closed Project, be Sensitive to the Magnitude of the Change

You can read more in-depth about these points in Producing Open Source Software.

Benevolent Dictators

The benevolent dictator model is exactly what it sounds like: final decision-making authority rests with one person, who, by virtue of personality and experience, is expected to use it wisely.

Although "benevolent dictator" (or BD) is the standard term for this role, it would be better to think of it as "community-approved arbitrator" or "judge". Generally, benevolent dictators do not actually make all the decisions, or even most of the decisions. It's unlikely that one person could have enough expertise to make consistently good decisions across all areas of the project, and anyway, quality developers won't stay around unless they have some influence on the project's direction. Therefore, benevolent dictators commonly do not dictate much. Instead, they let things work themselves out through discussion and experimentation whenever possible. They participate in those discussions themselves, but as regular developers, often deferring to an area maintainer who has more expertise. Only when it is clear that no consensus can be reached, and that most of the group wants someone to guide the decision so that development can move on, does she put her foot down and say "This is the way it's going to be." Reluctance to make decisions by fiat is a trait shared by almost all successful benevolent dictators; it is one of the reasons they manage to keep the role.

You may also see a BDFL, or Benevolent Dictator For Life, run a project. This means the person is in charge until they pass the mantle onto another BDFL or to the community.

Write It Down

Once you have established a set of operating rules, you should write it down so that new developers can quickly bring themselves up to speed. This will often be stored in a CONTRIBUTING file in the top level of a project alongside the README. You can see examples of this file for Bootstrap, jQuery, and the Dash engine.

Version Control Is Your Friend

The fact that the project's source code is kept under version control means that most decisions can be easily unmade. The most common way this happens is that someone commits a change mistakenly thinking everyone would be happy with it, only to be met with objections after the fact. It is typical for such objections to start out with an obligatory apology for having missed out on prior discussion, though this may be omitted if the objector finds no record of such a discussion in the mailing list archives. Either way, there is no reason for the tone of the discussion to be different after the change has been committed than before. Any change can be reverted, at least until dependent changes are introduced (i.e., new code that would break if the original change were suddenly removed). The version control system gives the project a way to undo the effects of bad or hasty judgement. This, in turn, frees people to trust their instincts about how much feedback is necessary before doing something.

This also means that the process of establishing consensus need not be very formal. Most projects handle it by feel. Minor changes can go in with no discussion, or with minimal discussion followed by a few nods of agreement. For more significant changes, especially ones with the potential to destabilize a lot of code, people should wait a day or two before assuming there is consensus, the rationale being that no one should be marginalized in an important conversation simply because he didn't check email frequently enough.

References

1. http://producingoss.com

How to Use Git

Git is easily the most popular version control system among open-source code slingers[1]. While git may seem complex at first, it is relatively easy to understand.

Git is a distributed version control system, meaning that changes are stored on every developers' machines separately (hence, distributed). However, there is usually a central server/service to host the code for everyone to access. This is usually an online code forge (see chapter 7).

When a file is changed, it is marked as "modified" by git. You can then add it to the index (or "stage" it) using the git add command. After you add your files, you can then "commit" them using the git commit command. Changes are stored as deltas, or changes. Whenever a file is changed and committed, git stores the change that was made. You can then "push" the commit to the central server using git push. Your teammates can then "pull" the changes onto their machines using git pull. You should always pull before making any changes, because if you pull after committing files, conflicts can result.

Give it a try yourself

GitHub and Code School have collaborated to build Try Git, an interactive tutorial to help you, well, try git.

References

1. Digital Ocean: Intro to Git
2. Official Git Tutorial
3. Udemy Git Tutorial

Sources

[1] StackExchange Programmers

Hosting Code

GitHub

At the time of this writing, GitHub is the most popular way to host public code. GitHub hosts git repositories and provides additional free (but not Open Source) functionality such as pull requests, issue trackers, and wikis. If you haven't already, you can read the How to Git chapter to learn more about how git works.

There is more to GitHub than a visualization of a git repo. Let's go through a "hypothetical" situation where you find a typo in this book and you, a developer, want to fix it. Firstly, you'll want to fork the repo. Find the button to fork the repo and GitHub will create a repository like github.com/your-username/HowToFOSS.

Note: You might notice a couple other buttons nearby, Watch and Star. Watching a repo will notify you when issues are created and commented on among other things. Starring a repo is way of showing your approval and support of a project, as well as acting as a bookmark for later.

Back to our scenario. You now have a clone of this book that you can do nearly anything with. For now, you want more than anything to go and fix the chapter containing the egregious spelling error. You can do this either by cloning the repo or by editing the file directly on GitHub. By viewing the file directly and clicking on the Edit button (ed. note: It is a pencil icon on the current site), you will be brought to an editor that will allow you to make changes, write a commit message, and create a commit in one fell swoop.

The world is very nearly a better place with that spelling error fixed. But how do you get your changes into the book that you are reading right now? You submit a Pull Request.

A pull request, or PR, will let the upstream developer know that you have made changes that you would like to be included their repository. Clicking the green button shown above will initiate a PR using all the commits exclusive to your repo. If another commit is added to your repo after you've opened the PR, it will be automatically included. After the upstream developer decides your code is OK to merge, the PR will be closed and your code will be merged. GitHub has a more in-depth tutorial of how pull requests work if you would like more information.

Woo! The fix for the spelling error is now included in the book! But what do you do with your forked repo? It is a matter of personal preference. In general, if you do not plan on contributing in the future and you feel that having a duplicated codebase might confuse people, delete the fork. Your contributions will live on in the upstream repository and you will not lose credit for your work.

Bitbucket

Bitbucket is built on Mercurial, a DVCS similar to git. Bitbucket is similar to GitHub, and now supports both git and Mercurial. Like GitHub, it provides extra free, but not Open Source, features.

CodePlex

CodePlex is a Microsoft-backed code host primarily used for C# .NET projects. With the recent transition of .NET to Github it would seem that Microsoft is beginning to move off of the platform.

SourceForge

Any discussion of project hosts has to talk about SourceForge as its significance a decade ago rivaled that of GitHub now. While the vast majority of new projects are not started on SourceForge anymore, it still boasts some 30 million downloads of hosted software each week. Code on SourceForge is backed by SVN, a version control system that has been losing conceptual ground to git and other systems for some time.

FOSS Ecosystems

• FOSS@MAGIC
• Research Computing
• codeRIT
• WiC

FOSS@MAGIC

Homepage

FOSS @ MAGIC is an initiative to promote Free/Open Source Software related activities that:

• Pursue applied research in and around RIT and with sponsors and external entities
• Support Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships
• Develop and/or supports FOSS academic efforts including the Open Source Minor, project courses and independent studies
• Coordinate and/or sponsors FOSS events like hackathons, speakers and POSSE
• Offer students employment opportunities for part-time work and co-ops with projects that are released via open-source license

RIT Research Computing

Homepage

Our mission is to foster research at RIT by partnering with researchers to support advanced research technology resources in computation, collaboration, and community building among RIT research faculty, staff and students.

Our guiding principles are communication, collaboration, and service. We aim to know the researchers, their research, and their needs. We want to involve researchers in our planning process and communicate our capabilities and vision to researchers.

Our goals are to help researchers help themselves, collaborate on research projects, develop innovative technologies, provide core resources, and build a research user community.

codeRIT

Homepage

codeRIT represents a coalition of RIT students with a mission to represent the RIT hackathon community on a national level. It focuses its attention towards increasing its relationship with other collegiate technical communities, teaching software development and entrepreneurial skills to its members, and uniting a fragmented collection of groups amongst GCCIS as one RIT group.

RIT Women in Computing

Homepage

Women in Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology is dedicated to promoting the success and advancement of women in their academic and professional careers. We offer the following to all RIT students: Networking and mentoring opportunities, professional development, leadership opportunities, technical skill advancement, community outreach and more.

Lana Verschage, the Director of Women in Computing, is working with all WiC Committee Leaders in preparation for the new 2015 - 2016 School Year. Logistics, event planning, outreach, public relations and alumna relations are just a few positions to get involved in. Our ultimate goal is to empower women in computer fields to succeed and thrive at Rochester Institute of Technology and beyond.

Business and Legal Profiles

• Enterprise
  • Acquia / Drupal
  • Khronos Group / OpenGL
  • Canonical / Ubuntu
  • GitHub
  • Apple / WebKit
  • Debian
  • Wordpress
• Fiscal Sponsorship
  • Eclipse Foundation
  • Software in the Public Interest
  • Linux Foundation
  • Apache Software Foundation
  • The Free Software Foundation
  • Software Freedom Conservancy
• Startups/Contemporary Issues
  • CodeCombat
  • Ouya
  • BeagleBoard Organization
  • Coinbase
  • Arduino
  • Lantern
  • Raspberry Pi
• Crowdfunding/Crowdfunded
  • BountySource
  • Patreon
  • IndieGoGo
  • Flattr
  • Gratipay
  • Kickstarter
• Civic Hacking/Dark Arts
  • Sugar / OLPC
  • 18f
  • The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)
  • Tor
  • Ushahidi

Enterprise

• Acquia / Drupal
• OpenGL / Khronos Group
• Canonical / Ubuntu
• GitHub
• Apple / WebKit
• Debian
• Wordpress

Profile: Acquia / Drupal

Authors

• Alex Mack amm4108/amm4108@g.rit.edu
• Katie Tigue kaffys/katie@mail.rit.edu

Rationale

Katie has a lot of personal use with Drupal, and it is also what runs most of the Rochester Institute of Technology websites.

Organizational Details

• Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity? Yes
• What type?
• When was it founded? 2007
• By whom? Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson
• Original founder(s) still active? Dries is still active
• Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price? It is privately traded.
• Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products? No it has not.
• Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones. No it hasn't, but Amazon has invested in Acquia.
• Number of Employees? 600
• Where is HQ? Boston, MA
• Does it have any other offices or locations? No
• Website? Acquia
• Wikipedia? Acquia on Wikipedia
• Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Communications

Social Media for Acquia / Drupal

• Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community. (i.e.Twitter: @RedHatNews - 61.9K Followers.
  • @drupal - 57.3K Followers

Communications channels for Acquia / Drupal

• What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.
  • They mostly use their mailing list to talk to the public.

Acquia / Drupal Conference Participation

• Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.
  • Drupal participates in and hosts a multitude of events ranging from user group meetings to their own convention. All of the upcoming events can be found at https://groups.drupal.org/events

Community Architecture

• The project's IRC Channel: #drupal, #drupal-contribute, #drupal-support are the main channels. There’s also a long list of topic channels at https://www.drupal.org/irc. They’re all on freenode

• Source Code repository : http://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git

• Mail list archive: Archives are set up separately. They can be found at https://www.drupal.org/mailing-lists

• Documentation : All of the documentation is found at https://www.drupal.org/documentation

• Project Website and/or Blog: Website at https://www.drupal.org/, blog at https://www.drupal.org/planet, the blog is an aggregate of multiple blogs having to do with drupal

• Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

  • “Drupal is a content management system which allows you to create and maintain many different types of websites without needing to know any coding languages.” taken from https://www.drupal.org/documentation/understand

• Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

  • It began as a message board in 1999. When more people became interested, the project became open source. The original commit for the project was May 14, 2000. The latest February 21, 2015.

• Who approves patches? How many people?

  • Currently Dries Buytaert, Nathaniel Catchpole, Alex Pott, and Angela Byron make up the team of reviewers. The contributions are peer reviewed and then decided on by Dries or another of the core committers. Anyone can submit patches against Drupal core. https://www.drupal.org/node/21778

• Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

  • The main reviewers are the only ones who have commit access. There are 37,610 people are counted as developers for the entire project.

• Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

  • There has been a lot of turnover for each successive version. Dries has always been among these people but the branch maintainers have changed.

• Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

  • Dries Buytaert

• Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

  • For the most part they are different developers, because it’s broken out into different projects. Drupal Core is the back-end for it and the front end is constantly updating when new people make new themes for it.

• What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

• How is the project's participation trending and why?

  • Recently participation has been trending downwards, but it looks like it’s because the project is in an extremely stable state right now.

• In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

  • Yes, while he’s definitely a major contributor, there’s a ton of documentation, and there’s an active development community.

• In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

  • I think the project would survive, but development would definitely slow down. There is a ton of documentation.

• Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

  • Yes, they have a page in their community section that is specifically about getting involved. It talks about multiple different ways you can do this.

• Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

  • Drupal has very extensive documentation. Quickly glancing through I couldn’t find any code examples, but there are links to a lot of other places you can look for help from.

• If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

  • The first thing I would do is hop into their IRC channel and ask people there. If the people who are there couldn’t help then I’d head over to their forums at https://www.drupal.org/forum and seek additional help.

• Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

  • It is currently a mix of hierarchical and ruled by a small group. While Dries Buytaert has the ultimate say in pretty much everything, there is a group of people who also help him make his decisions.

• Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

  • I normally work better in a more chaotic environment, but I could see myself putting out some decent work in this sort of structure.

Technology/Product (Section adapted from EFF Worksheet)

• Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?
• What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?
• Who would benefit from using this technology?
• What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?
• Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

Profile: OpenGL & Khronos Group

Authors

• Fernando Ellis (fortnight)
• Andrew Mangula (ajman1101)
• Brendan Whitfield (beWhitty)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

OpenGL is a widely used library for rendering accelerated graphics. Given its widespread adoption, our group wished to know more about its structure and community.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

No, Khronos Group is a consortium, which is an assemblage of corporations seeking a common goal.

What type?

non-profit, member-funded consortium

When was it founded?

Started with the "OpenGL Architecture Review Board" in 1992. The first release of OpenGL was written by Mark Segal and Kurt Akeley. The Khronos Group was founded in 2000.

By whom?

These members formed the "OpenGL Architecture Review Board", which transferred control to the Khronos group in 2006.

• 3Dlabs
• ATI
• Discreet
• Evans & Sutherland
• Intel
• NVIDIA
• Silicon Graphics (SGI)
• Sun Microsystem

Original founder(s) still active?

• Intel
• NVIDIA

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Not publically traded. Non-profit consortium that charges membership fees.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

No. Their only purpose is to design new versions of the standard.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No. However, the inverse is occasionally true. Some member companies may wish to invest, and exert control within the consortium.

Number of Employees?

The president is Neil Trevett, also the VP of Mobile Content at NVIDIA.

• 84 Contributors (Participants with voting rights)
• 15 Academic Members (Participants with NO voting rights)
• 12 Promoters (function as Board of Directors)

Where is HQ?

15500 SW JAY ST 45043
BEAVERTON, OR 97006-6018 USA

Does it have any other offices or locations?

Khronos Group Inc
9450 SW Gemini Drive
#45043, Beaverton, Oregon 97008-6018, USA

Website?

• khronos.org
• opengl.org

Wikipedia?

• Khronos Group
• OpenGL

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

IRS Form-990 (2010) EIN: 82-0561169

"The federal tax exemption of this organization was automatically revoked for its failure to file a Form 990-series return or notice for three consecutive years" (2014)

• Total Revenue: $1,441,665
• Total Expenses: $1,366,213

Communications

Social media for OpenGL & Khronos Group

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Facebook - 1512 likes
• Twitter - 5579 Tweets, 5333 Followers
• LinkedIn - 1245 Members
• Youtube - 793 Subscribers, 111 Uploads
• Flickr - 1540 Photos
• Slideshare - 67 SlideShares, 88 Followers
• Google+ - 117 Followers, 8119 Views

Communications channels for OpenGL & Khronos Group

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

Khronos group hosts their own new feeds typically makes major announcements at conferences such as SIGGRAPH and GDC.

OpenGL & Khronos Group Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

• SIGGRAPH
• GDC
• More events are listed in their event archives

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

#opengl

Source Code repository

OpenGL is not open source, but rather an open specification. As such they do not have an code repository, but updating your drivers will usually get you the most recent release of the graphics implementation.

Mail list archive

There is only a Mac-OpenGL mailing list, with the current archive only available to list members.

Documentation

OpenGL Specifications

Other communication channels

• Forums
• Usenet newsgroup: comp.graphics.api.opengl

Project Website and/or Blog

opengl.org

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

"OpenGL is the premier environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications" (source)

"Khronos' primary products are open specifications and associated conformance tests that enable hardware and software communities to effectively communicate with each other" (source)

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

Again, it does not have a source code repository and as such does not have commits, but Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) initiated development on OpenGL and released it January 1992. Before being released in this open standard, it was previously exclusive to SGI and known as IrisGL. Several companies were brought together to form the OpenGL Architecture Review Board that would oversee the OpenGL project. The change was a gradual one due to many functions of the API that wouldn’t work across multiple hardware platforms. To overcome this, OpenGL would support features unsupported by hardware, allowing for high-powered graphics on low-powered systems. Its main competitor was Direct3D, implemented by Microsoft in 1995. Through December 1997 to 1999, an effort to unify the two, the Fahrenheit project, was created, but abandoned due to financial reasons. In 2006, control of OpenGL was transferred from the OpenGL Architecture Review Board to the Khronos Group. The most recent stable release (version 4.5) came out August 11, 2014.

Who approves patches? How many people?

The member companies with voting rights. 84 Contributors + 12 Promoters (96 in total).

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

Only members of the Khronos group are allowed to participate in construction of the latest standards. Standards that are in-progress are confidential to prevent patent trolling.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

The first version was released by Mark Segal and Kurt Akeley in 1992. Releases and structural changes were then overseen by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB). In September 2006, the OpenGL ARB became the OpenGL Working Group under the Khronos Group. Many of the developers transferred with the rebranding, however few ties to the original creators, SGI, remain.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Mark Segal and Kurt Akeley released the first version in 1992. Their names have been the only two author’s names on version 2.0, released October 2004, and version 4.5, released February 2nd, 2015.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

N/A OpenGL is purely documentation and back-end testing

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

There was a controversy about OpenGL’s 3.0 release codenamed “Longs Peak.” The uproar was caused by structural changes to the code’s classification of objects, rendering them immutable causing much of the software to be re-written. As a result, a much tamer upgrade was released for version 3.0, and several disappointed developers switched to Direct3D development.

Alongside the standard, Khronos Group also creates conformance tests controlling who is allowed to use the OpenGL logo. One must sign up as either an Implementer, or an Adopter.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

It is included on such a wide array of devices that its only major competitor is Mircosoft’s DirectX graphics API. OpenGL comes standard in most graphical device drivers, and has NVIDIA as one of its conformant companies.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Yes, because the project is 90% documentation. Since the Khronos Group only designs the standards, the implementations are not affected. All finalized versions of the standard are publically released.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Yes, see above

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

Anyone can sign up to become a Member of the Khronos Group. The membership fees range from $1000 - $60,000, although membership fees for Open Source organizations are often waived. People implementing the standard can sign up as an implementer. Membership in projects that implement the standard varies by project.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

• The core specification
• Header files
• SDK resources

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

There is a reference card with a multitude of information available for developers.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

It is largely flat, with the exception of the 12 Promoters (functioning as the board of directors, steering the consortium).

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

As an implementer with a preference toward open-source I would enjoy working for this project. The structure detailed above does not take away from the programming experience. On the contrary, it resembles a balanced governance of the project overall: group of voting members is essential to any project that reflects multiple system functionality; adopters trademarking and publishing what works to demonstrate the new features of the project; ratified specifications get sent to a group of implementers; ISVs then receive this all and use vendor supplied drivers to release the specification royalty free. The only criticism I would have of the structure is that the implementers don’t seem to have much say about what gets voted on, but rather just do the developing.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

OpenGL is one of the Khronos Group’s working groups, and its specification is maintained by the OpenGL Architecture Review Board.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

It was designed to be an environment for the development of interactive and portable 2D and 3D graphical software.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Any software developer who requires high-performance graphics for their project, be it a game, virtual reality, mobile phone app or supercomputer.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Khronos Group and their subsidiaries would because they are the current sponsors and collaborators of the OpenGL working group. AMD has offered their Mantle API to use as the basis of the next generation of OpenGL. Valve Corporation, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, and Unity Technologies participated in a GDC conference session for the unveiling of Vulkan, the next generation of OpenGL APIs.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

No, the licensing and/or copyrights of the OpenGL project have not been the cause of any large controversies.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

The khronos Group charges memebership fees. These fees range from $1000 - $60,000. Fees are often waived for open source projects wishing to join.

How does this organization make revenue?

See above

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Membership in order to recieve professional services (conformance tests), and branding rights.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

None

Profile: Canonical / Ubuntu

Authors

• Michael Tubinis (mtubinis)
• Brian Escriche (Pharas)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

Pharas did not have a preference. I am starting my own linux project (a first) so I was looking at different distros. Ubuntu seemed to be the one I liked the most, so why not find more about it?

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes, Canonical Ltd.

What type?

A private company limited by shares.

When was it founded?

It was founded on March 5th, 2004.

By whom?

It was founded by Mark Shuttleworth.

Original founder(s) still active?

He is still active within the company.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

The company is not publicly traded.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

The company has made 0 acquisitions.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

The company has made 0 investments.

Number of Employees?

Roughly 500 employees across 30 countries.

Where is HQ?

27th Floor, 
Millbank Tower 21-24 Millbank,
London, 
SW1P 4QP GBR

Does it have any other offices or locations?

Yes it has offices in London, Boston, Taipei, Montreal, Shanghai, São Paulo and the Isle of Man

Website?

Canonical.com

Wikipedia?

Canonical on Wikipedia

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Here is the Annual Report for 2013

Communications

Social media for Canonical / Ubuntu

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• @Canonical - 841 Tweets, 564 Following, 32,000 Followers
• Google+ - 6475 followers, 125,973 page visits
• Facebook - 5086 Likes

Communications channels for Canonical / Ubuntu

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

Canonical keeps mostly to the social media listed above for anything not work related.

Canonical / Ubuntu Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

Ubuntu participates in several conferences. A list can be found here.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

The project's IRC Channels

Source Code repository

Source Code repository

Mail list archive

Mail list archive

Documentation

N/A

Other communication channels

N/A

Project Website and/or Blog

Project Website

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Ubuntu comes from the African word Ubuntu meaning 'humanity to others'. Ubuntu was founded in 2004 as a free and easy to use Linux Desktop that was designed to be part social and part economic: free software, available to everybody on the same terms, and funded through a portfolio of services provided by Canonical. This from Wikipedia.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

The project started before the initial release on 20 October 2004, The Warty Warthog Release. Ubuntu's latest release was on April 23, 2015, The Vivid Vervet Release.

Who approves patches? How many people?

List - As far as we can tell, these seven.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

While the number is undoubtedly large, Ubuntu doesn’t have the information readily available to view. This is also tempered by which project you want to look at specifically.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

It doesn’t look like the team has changed all that much, at least according to this.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

No, there are several people that contribute to various portions of Ubuntu.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

While possible, it is doubtful that they are considering the amount of people using Ubuntu. It is more likely that there is more developing for the back-end though.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

There is very little forward facing information from Ubuntu, so it is hard to find anything concrete without delving into the mailing lists surrounding different project aspects.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Ubuntu is fairly popular, mostly because of how they do business and the thoroughness that they have with their product

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Yes, Ubuntu is backed by a huge, globe-spanning corporation and thousands, if not millions, of users.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

See the above answer.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

ContributeToUbuntu

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

There appears to be documentation for every project they have, with documentation even about adding to their documentation. There are code examples.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

Depends entirely on which part you would be contributing to, as there are so many different IRCs, mailing lists, and wikis that are all organized by different people.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

It is entirely dependant on which project you are talking about, as the core Ubuntu project seems to be headed by the previously mentioned group of 7, but smaller divisions are present and dedicated to different aspects of the experience.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Yes, the project is organized and has a good structure to it. It is also very popular, and depended on by so many people.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

For this section we will take a look at one of Canonical's products used to maintain servers: Landscape.

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Landscape (Product). Landscape was created by Canonical.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Landscape is designed to assist in monitoring, managing, and updating an entire Ubuntu infrastructure from one single interface.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Server owners/administrators, IT managers, and similar people who are in charge of the infrastructure or a part of it would benefit from using this product.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Since landscape is supposed to work mainly with Ubuntu, it would not be a direct conflict with other operating systems. Therefore only companies who are developing a similar kind of technology for Ubuntu, or developers of other distros that are in competition with Ubuntu would be concerned with the development of this technology from a business standpoint.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

Since the product is mostly limited as to what it can be used for, I don’t think it had any aspects of law or copyright law coming into question or being violated.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

There is no information about how Canonical was originally funded.

How does this organization make revenue?

Canonical makes its revenue through donations and services.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

• Voluntary donations
• Selling professional services

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

The company has made no acquisitions and no investments.

Profile: GitHub

Authors

• Matt Soucy (msoucy)
• Liam Middlebrook (loothelion)
• Julien Eid (jeid64)
• Aaron Herting (qwertos)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

GitHub is used by an enormous variety of hackers, including us, so we wanted to learn more about its origins

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes

What type?

GitHub is a Corporation Registered in the State of Delaware

When was it founded?

GitHub was founded, April 10th, 2008

By whom?

• Tom Preston-Werner
• Chris Wanstrath
• PJ Hyett

Original founder(s) still active?

All of the original founders are still active with the exception of Tom Preston-Werner.
He left GitHub in 2014 after confirmed [harassment allegations]

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

GitHub is a private corporation and isn't publically traded

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

GitHub has acquired the following companies:

• Easel - In Browser Web Design Tool Built for Collaboration
• Ordered List - Gauges, Speaker Deck, Harmony

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones?

GitHub hasn't invested in any other companies Interestingly enough the first investment in GitHub was for $100M

Number of employees?

GitHub has 267 employees, some of which work at their HQ:

Where is HQ?

88 Colin P Kelly Jr St (at Brannan St)
San Francisco, CA 94107, United States

Does it have any other offices or locations?

GitHub doesn't have any other locations

Website?

http://github.com

Wikipedia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

GitHub does not have any annual reports.

Communications

Social media for GitHub

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• @github
• @githubstatus (Downtime reporting)
• LinkedIn

Communications channels for GitHub

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public?

• GitHub’s press page lists all of their awards that they have received.
• GitHub also has a blog that has lots of interesting posts.
• They also include a Glossary so writers can better report about what the company does.

GitHub Conference Participation

• Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences?
  • GitHub hosts "GitHub Universe" which is their own conference about working on open source projects as well as gathering tons of people working in open source.
  • GitHub also hosts "CodeConf" a two day conference about open source, best practices, documentation, and collaboration.
  • GitHub also attends several other conferences including GDC.

Community Architecture

Github and Government

The project's IRC Channel

N/A

Source Code repository

Repository

Mail list archive

N/A

Documentation

The project is entirely documentation

Other communication channels

N/A

Project Website and/or Blog

Website

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Github and Government is a website dedicated to sharing open government efforts that involve Github

Give a brief history of the project. When was the intial commit? The latest commit?

Started January 20, 2013 Most recent commit May 15, 2015 (As of May 17, 2015)

Who approves patches? How many people?

Two people (benbalter and jlord) accept all of the pull requests

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

benbalter and jlord seem to be the only two maintainers (BDFLs).

Numerous contributors adding individual stories.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

The original developers have remained with the project the entire time.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Yes, benbalter and jlord

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

The project is a website, so almost all work is frontend.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

No real visible issues, the website is entirely documentation

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Development has been active throughout its lifetime

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

The project would continue fine if one of the two main devs were eaten by a velociraptor

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

The top 20% of the contributors includes both BDFLs, so the project might not survive

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

No onboarding, since most of it is adding information instead of code

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

Irrelevant, the project is essentially documentation itself.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

One of the BDFLs, in an issue on GitHub

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Ruled by a pair of individuals who try to make sure data is complete and accurate

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

This structure is well-suited for this project, but maybe not for a code-based project

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

GitHub is powered completely by Git, a distributed source control system.

• Git was originally started by Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.
• Git was initially started to track the Linux kernel and was then used by other projects.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

• Created to be a highly distributed SCM, GitHub based their entire product on using Git.
• GitHub now uses git as the tool it uses to track most of their repos and interface with GitHub.
• Contrary to popular belief, Git existed before GitHub. GitHub created a nice visual front end and a great central area for code repos.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Lots of people interested in working on the same set of files or tracking changes in files could potentially use Git.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about th e development of this technology? Why?

Companies that market proprietary revision control systems would probably have been concerned about a free alternative that gained traction extremely quickly.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

• The Linux kernel was originally tracked in BitKeeper, a properitary SCM.
• Devs of BitKeeper resciended license to use it and the kernel was left in the cold.
• Linus became fed up and created his own that would be FOSS so that incident could never happen again.
• GitHub is not open source, leading to an ironic situation that one of the most central sites for FOSS software isn’t FOSS itself.
• GitHub also has a default license that has been controversial over some of its terms.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Angel investors

How does this organization make revenue?

Subscriber service allows private repositories and other perks in exchange for monthly payments

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Subscriber model

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

GitHub hasn't invested in any other companies.

Acquisitions:

• Easel
• Ordered List

Profile: Apple / WebKit

Authors

• Kocsen Chung kocsen/kocsenc@gmail.com
• Andrew Schott snapschott/afs7827@rit.edu
• Will Paul dropofwill/whp3652@rit.edu

Rationale

We picked WebKit because it is a huge piece of software. The web runs the world, and the world runs on WebKit. WebKit is the biggest (as of today) player in this market. It is also quite a unique culture since it is heavily tied with Apple and Kocsen worked on the WebKit team.

Apple Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes, Apple is a corporation.

What type?

Publicly traded

When was it founded?

1977

By whom?

Steve Jobs, Kevin Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne.

Original founder(s) still active?

No.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Publicly traded, since 1980 at $22 per share with 800k shares total.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

Yes, 63 to date. Some notable ones:

• NeXT ($400,000,000, became part of OSX and iOS)
• AuthenTec ($356,000,000, lead to TouchID)
• Zayante ($13,000,000, lead to FireWire).

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

Only 2, Akamai Technologies (web site support services) and Imagination Technologies (chip design).

Number of Employees?

About 98,000

Where is HQ?

Cupertino, California, U.S.

Does it have any other offices or locations?

Several headquarters across the world with smaller offices and retail stores throughout.

Website?

www.apple.com

Wikipedia?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Annual Report for 2014

Communications

Social media for WebKit

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

They have a minimal social media presence.

Facebook: 56 likes

Twitter: 5,863 Followers

Wiki

Communications channels for WebKit

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

IRC Channel: freenode #webkit

SVN Repository Link: http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk

Mailing List Archive: webkit-help@lists.webkit.org - for general help

Blog/Website: Blog - https://www.webkit.org/blog/ Website - https://www.webkit.org/

WebKit Conference Participation

WebKit has irregular and sparse meetups/conferences for the community, but has one large annual contributors meeting usually in Cupertino, CA.

WebKit Community Architecture

The project's IRC Channel

freenode #webkit

Mail list archive

webkit-help@lists.webkit.org

Documentation

WebKit is very mature. So they do have very extensive documentation and strict code guidelines.

Other communication channels Project Website and/or Blog

Answered above.

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

All in all, WebKit is a huge open source community. I would call it a very set and mature codebase. It has no fear of suddenly stopping and powers a lot of the web out there. It has an interesting aspect to it since a private company like Apple is behind it all but it seems to work.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

WebKit code started in 98, with KDE HTML layout engine. After some discussions, Apple ended up announcing Safari in 2003 which used JavaScriptCore. Eventually KHTML & WebCore didn’t stay on the same page so Apple decided to fork into WebKit. Dave Hyatt announced in 2005 that Apple would open source WebKit.

Who approves patches? How many people? Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

There are a total of around 250 official committers and reviewers of the webkit project. See them all here.

To be a committer, you should follow and trust the project. A Committer gets nominated once they have around 10-20 good patches. They also have to show that they are not a potato and understand the policies and the collaboration behind the project.

To be a reviewer you should have a very good judgement and understanding of project policies and vision. You should at least submitted 80 good patches and should be an active member of the community. 3 Reviewers must second the acceptance/nomination of a new reviewer.

You can become inactive and get committer/reviewer status revoked.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

Changes a bit, since core contributions tend to be from companies, so as employees change contributors do as well.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

No, there are a lead reviewers, but there are way more than 1.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

No front-end work really, aside from documentation.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Apple has a very clear bug lifecycle. They use mailing lists to take care of code reviews and a lot of the communication surrounding the community.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Downward slightly because of the Blink/WebKit fork, but since patches are still being shared it still is going pretty strong.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not? In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

WebKit is strong and huge, no bus or raptor can stop it. As long as it has major corporations relying on it for a key part of their infrastructure we don't see it going anywhere.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

There is a getting around section on the Wiki, which is pretty short, but gives enough guidance to at least know where everything is and how to build it.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

The WebKit wiki is extensive and regularly updated with sections for each major component in WebKit.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

The mailing list is pretty active with people running into problems, seems to be a slightly better place to go then IRC.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

It is hierarchical and that has lead to at least some conflict and obviously the Blink fork.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Probably not, its huge and they have had some problems.

Licenses?

LGPL - JavaScriptCore & WebCore

BSD2 - Everything Else

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

KDE started it, but its changed hands a number of times over the years. Headed up by Apple at the moment.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

It's web rendering engine for anyone interested in using HTML, SVG, Canvas, JavaScript, etc. So primarily companies/organizations making web browsers.

Who would benefit from using this technology? What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

WebKit was and is used in a number applications including, but not limited to:

• Apple Safari
• Blackberry’s OS
• Amazon Kindle

And in the past by:

• Opera
• Google Chrome

Even those who have used it in the past still have an active interest since most Blink development still revolves around merging WebKit patches.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

There has not been a lot of controversy around the copyright itself, but there has been some internal conflict that lead to the Blink fork. For example: one engineer made a comment on the mailing list entitle WebKit Wishes prior to the fork that said:

I’ve worked at both Apple and Google. The WebKit community is full of brilliant engineers. Yet I frequently feel a lack of trust in my (or others) judgement, or witness hot-headed remarks on bugs, lists or IRC. I don’t think it’s that people don’t trust me after nearly 8 years (!?) on this project, but rather that we forget, or fail to communicate trust among ourselves. Social problems are perhaps harder to solve for us technical types, but I worry that for many of us it’s just become “us” and “them” and we’ve stopped trying. - emphasis ours

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

KDE wasn't/isn't a company.

How does this organization make revenue?

It doesn't, but other companies definitely use it in products that make money.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Apple primarily makes money through merging the open source rendering/javascript engine that is WebKit into their proprietary browser Safari, which only runs on their OS, which only runs on their hardware. So at the end of the day it makes sense for their current revenue model as a company as a whole, they are very much a hardware company.

The benefit for making this open source is that 1) it was already open source when they got their hands on it, so it was a good starting place, 2) it allowed major corporations to not reinvent the wheel (especially pre-blink fork), with major contributions from not just Apple, but Google, Nokia, Blackberry, Amazon, Adobe, and many more.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

Apple has made a bunch, but WebKit itself hasn't.

Profile: Debian

Authors

• Derin Yarsuvat (Beruberufunbot)
• Chris Knepper (chrisknepper)
• Joe Trotta (h2g2guy)

Rationale

Debian is a relatively large distribution, I think we would all agree, and is, as far as Linux distributions go, one of the most influental. So many projects and even other distributions are based off of Debian's code that every decision made by the folks behind Debian affects thousands of others, and hundreds of projects. We felt that because of the significance of the project, and the "pseudo-corporate" structure of the organization behind it, that Debian would be a good fit for our first "profile".

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Not really.

What type?

Open source project. They say: "The Debian Project is a worldwide group of volunteers who endeavor to produce an operating system distribution that is composed entirely of free software."

When was it founded?

August 6th, 1993

By whom?

Ian Murdock

Original founder(s) still active?

Not anymore (he's no longer the project lead, at least)

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Nope, it's a non-profit.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

Nope.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

Nope.

Number of Employees?

856 (Contributors)

Where is HQ?

No physical HQ.

Does it have any other offices or locations?

Nope.

Website?

debian.org

Wikipedia?

yep

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

It's not an annual report, but they do have the DPN

Communications

Social media for Debian

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Google Plus

• Facebook

• Twitter

Communications channels for Debian

Mailing lists and the DPN

Debian Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

• DebConf
• -DebConf - 2015: Heidelberg, Germany
• -DebConf - 2014: Portland, Oregon

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

irc.debian.org

Source Code repository

http://sources.debian.net/

Mail list archive

Mailing lists

Documentation

wiki

Project Website and/or Blog

http://debian.org

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Same as above.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

Started when the project started.

Who approves patches? How many people?

A lot of people

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

It changes frequently, and there are a very large amount of teams. The current list of teams related to Debian can be seen here.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Nope, as can be seen here

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Again, seperate teams, each with seperate roles. The teams can be viewed here.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

More than be could be listed here. However, a recent bout that comes to mind is the whole systemd debacle.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

It's still pretty high.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

It passed that test in 1997, I can only assume it'd pass it again today.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Yep. See above.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

Of course, and they're all outlined here.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

It has a developer's reference and a developer's guide

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

Probably IRC. Or the mailing list.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Hierarchical. An almost corporate structure.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Yes. This is the kind of structure, IMHO, that keeps large FOSS projects alive.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Ian Murdock, though Linux was by Linus Torvalds.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

A general OS.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

All. (Well, anyone who needs an operating system)

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Anyone who hosts a website on a Debian server ;)

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

Not that I know of.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

It never received original funding. It was a project, supported by individual contributors. A brief history of Debian, for those curious, may be found here.

How does this organization make revenue?

Donations.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Donations. And, well, contributions.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

None.

Profile: Wordpress

Authors

• Caleb Coffie (C_Coffie)
• Wyatt Winters (wywin)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

Wordpress is a gigantic thing. It powers (at least) 23% of the web (source). We wanted to dive deeper into what the community looks like that generates such a massively popular piece of software.

It was also one of the suggested ones, so that is also a reason.

Organizational Details

1. Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

• Automattic is the corporate entity

2. What type?

• Incorporated

3. When was it founded?

• May 27, 2003

4. By whom?

• Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little

5. Original founder(s) still active?

• Matt Mullenweg is still active on the project. Mike Little is no longer active on the project.

6. Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

• Automattic/Wordpress is not publically traded.

7. Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

• Gravatar - Avatars
• BuddyPress - Social networking on a blog
• IntenseDebate - Commenting service
• Polldaddy - Surveys and polls
• Blo.gs - Directory of blogs
• After The Deadline - Spell checker
• Plinky - Writing prompts
• Code Garage - Backups and security scanning
• Simperium and Simplenote - Note taking and data synchronization
• Poster - Wordpress mobile app
• Lean Domain Search - Domain name search
• Cloudup - File-sharing service
• Longreads - Sharing service for long form posts
• Scroll Kit - Visual HTML editor
• Parka - Security scanning
• Code For the People - Wordpress development firm

(source)

8. Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

• No they have not. They normally just purchase the companies.

9. Number of Employees?

• 306 (source)

10. Where is HQ?

• 132 Hawthorne St, San Francisco, CA 94107 (source)

11. Does it have any other offices or locations?

• None

12. Website?

• http://automattic.com/

13. Wikipedia?

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automattic

14. Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

• Bi-annual transparency reports: reports

Communications

1. Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community. (i.e. Twitter: @RedHatNews - 61.9K Followers.)

• Twitter: @wordpress - 442K followers

2. What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

• Users of the SaaS product can get notifications and other info on their landing pages. Users of their own installations can get similar notifications.
• The Twitter handle mentioned above appears to be more or less a release log.

3. Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

• Wordcamp - first organized by Matt Mullenweg, but numerous spinoffs have been established. (source)
• There’s a conference aggregator named Lanyrd that has a Wordpress tag: Lanyard

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions:

If applicable, list and provide links to:

1. The project's IRC Channel

• http://codex.wordpress.org/IRC

2. Source Code repository

• https://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/
• https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress

3. Mail list archive

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Mailing_Lists

4. Documentation

• http://codex.wordpress.org/

5. Other communication channels

• They are currently evaluating Slack: https://make.wordpress.org/chat/

6. Project Website and/or Blog

• https://wordpress.org/news/
• https://wordpress.org/

7. Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

• Wordpress is a blogging platform and CMS. “...the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.” (source)

8. Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

• First commit: Tue Apr 1 06:17:43 2003 +0000
• Latest commit: Probably in the last 24 hours.

9. Who approves patches? How many people?

• It appears that the people who approve patches and those who have commit access are the same group.

10. Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

• There are 42 people in the log of the SVN, so most likely a number smaller than 42 (assuming some people have since retired from contributing).

11. Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

• There is a list of “Developer Emeriti”, comprised of 10 people. (source)

12. Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

• Lead Developers: (source)
  • Helen Hou-Sandí
  • Dion Hulse
  • Mark Jaquith
  • Matt Mullenweg
  • Andrew Nacin
  • Andrew Ozz

13. Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

• There are 4 people listed as “design”, so we will call them front end devs for our purposes. Discarding the non-differentiated “contributing developers”, that leaves a 4/6 split for frontend/backend.

14. What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

• A vast majority of Wordpress vulns are a result of third-party plugins, and as such, do not fall under the umbrella of the core project.
• No major bugs / vulns in core Wordpress were highly publicized.

15. How is the project's participation trending and why?

• The project’s number of contributors is difficult to gauge accurately - because of the architecture of the community, a large number of contributions via patches get “filtered” through a smaller number of people. As such, the number of contributors has remained roughly the same over time. (source)

16. In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

• Yes, because there are numerous people with access to the main repo.

17. In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

• Maybe not - the access to the main repo seems limited at best, and consequently the most active are the ones who have access.

18. Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

• There is a Contributor Handbook, but it’s in a very rough state: handbook

19. Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

• User documentation is at: http://codex.wordpress.org/
• Code documentation is at: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/
• Both sets of documentation are extensive.

20. If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

• Asking in the Slack most likely, but it appears to be invite only / requires approval before accounts can be created.

21. Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

• It’s a small group - one can only make changes with discrete patch files, not pull requests. Patches are submitted to the bug tracker and assessed / merged from there by core devs.

22. Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

• While the strict structure resulted in a very robust and very stable core product, it feels difficult to contribute. It also feels a little too reliant on a small group of people.

Technology/Product (Section adapted from EFF Worksheet)

1. Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

• Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little founded Automattic Inc. to (initially) work on Wordpress.

2. What was the technology designed to do? How was it used?

• "...the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software." (source)
• It is a browser based CMS / blogging platform.

3. Who would benefit from using this technology?

• Anyone who wants to publish content, written or otherwise, easily online.

4. What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

• Developers of other (commercial) blogging platforms, governments wishing to squelch dissent, and people who generally dislike blogs for whatever reason.

5. Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

• A case of a fraudulent DMCA (fairly recent as well!): case

Fiscal Sponsorship

• Eclipse Foundation
• Software in the Public Interest
• Linux Foundation
• Apache Software Foundation
• The Free Software Foundation
• Software Freedom Conservancy

Profile: Eclipse Foundation

Authors

• Alex Mack amm4108/amm4108@g.rit.edu
• Katie Tigue Kaffys/katie@mail.rit.edu
• Andrew Mandula ajman1101/ajman@csh.rit.edu

Rationale

Eclipse is something that I've had a lot of interaction with, the main Eclipse project was one of the first IDEs I ever used.

Organizational Details

• Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?
  • Yes
• What type?
  • A Not-For-Profit
• When was it founded?
  • November 2001, it was then reorganized in 2004 to become a not-for-profit organization.
• By whom?
  • Ericsson, HP, IBM, Intel, MontaVista Software, QNX, SAP and Serena Software.
• Original founder(s) still active?
  • The original founders are no longer active.
• Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?
  • No it is not.
• Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?
  • No
• Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.
  • No
• Number of Employees?
  • 19
• Where is HQ?
  • Ontario, Canada
• Does it have any other offices or locations?
  • No
• Website?
  • Eclipse
• Wikipedia?
  • Eclipse on Wikipedia
• Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)
  • Yes they do file annual reports. These reports can be found at Annual Reports

Communications

Social Media for the Eclipse Foundation

• Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.
  • @EclipseFdn - 11.9k Followers
  • Google+ - 32,165 followers and 3,004,910 views
  • Facebook - 79,478 likes
  • YouTube - 5,900 Subscribers
  • Flickr

Communications channels for the Eclipse Foundation

• What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.
  • Public facing webpage. There is a news feed for both Community related events and one for Announcements. eclipse.org

Eclipse Foundation Conference Participation

• Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.
  • EclipseCon
  • All Events can be found here: http://events.eclipse.org/

Community Architecture

• The project's IRC Channel - #eclipse on irc.freenode.net

• Source Code repository

• Mail list archive

• Documentation

• Forums

• Project Website

• Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

  • The unfortunately named "Eclipse Project" is the project dedicated to producing the Eclipse SDK. This name made sense back when there were only two or three projects at Eclipse, but now it is frequently referred to as the "Eclipse top-level project" to reduce confusion (or just "The Platform" when we're feeling grandiose).

• Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

  • The most recent release was on June 26, 2013.
  • The initial Commit was in 2003.

• Who approves patches? How many people?

  • https://eclipse.org/eclipse/team-leaders.php - These people each are responibile for a section of the project.

• Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

  • PMC Leads

• Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

• Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

  • Mike Wilson has been at Eclipse since it’s founding.

• Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

• What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

  • Everyone is responsible for QA and bugs. every project has a bug forum where everyone can post and contribute to bug fixes.

• How is the project's participation trending and why?

• In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

  • I think it would pass the Raptor Test. There is a hoard of people behind Mike Wilson, and while he will be missed, i’m sure someone could step up to be the team lead.

• In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

  • Development would obviously be a little halted, but I believe it would be able to continue. Eclipse is backed by many big name companies, like IBM.

• Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

  • New contributors would most likely not start on the top-level project. They should start on one of the many subprojects. For Example, a subproject Orion has a very extensive new-contributor guide and lots of quick starts. http://wiki.eclipse.org/Orion/Getting_the_source http://wiki.eclipse.org/Orion/Getting_Started_with_Orion

• Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples? http://www.eclipse.org/documentation/

• If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

  • If you’re on a sub-project, the developers are very active on their IRC channels.

• Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

  • Hierarchical. Sub groups approve what patches get sent to the higher up groups, and the higher up groups determine what gets patched into the main project.

• Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Technology/Product (Section adapted from EFF Worksheet)

• Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?
  • The Eclipse Foundation was created in Feb. 2004 with a reorganization of the Eclipse Consortium. The Consortium had sponsors of HP, IBM, MontaVista, Intel, QNX Software Systems, SAP, and Serena Software. Today, the Eclipse Foundation’s sponsors are Actuate, IBM, Oracle, SAP, CA Inc and Google.
• What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?
  • The Eclipse Foundation was created to be the steward of the Eclipse IDE and software development environment. The foundation was works to create new technologies that work with or compliment Eclipse.
• Who would benefit from using this technology?
  • Any developers looking to make plug-ins for Eclipse, software that uses Eclipse or reach the large audience that uses the IDE would want to work with the foundation to integrate well into the Eclipse ecosystem.
• What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?
  • As the technology is an old IBM project that is now open source, IBM cares deeply about the project as they started it in a way. Google’s mobile operating system, Android uses Java as its base language and many Java developers work in Eclipse, so Google is also interested in the well being of the IDE and thus the foundation.
• Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How? There weren’t any issues that our team could find relating to copyright law.

Profile: Software in the Public Interest

Authors

• Fernando Ellis (fortnight)
• Brendan Whitfield (beWhitty)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

I didn’t know much about different fiscal sponsorship organizations, but the name caught my eye. If one doesn’t do things for the public interest, then what worth is there in doing them?

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes

What type?

Non-profit Organization

When was it founded?

June 16, 1997 in the State of New York

By whom?

The Debian Project, with an Initial Board of Directors consisting of:

• Timothy P. Sailer
• Bruce Perens
• Ian Murdock

Original founder(s) still active?

Bdale Garbee is currently the president of Software in the Public Interest, as well as the second name in a list of contributors in the brief history of the Debian Project.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Not publically traded

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

No, because Software in the Public interest itself doesn’t have any products, but rather helps other organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

Yes, organized donations and investments is in part the organization’s role. Associated projects include, but are not limited to:

• 0 A.D.
• Ankur
• aptosid
• Arch Linux
• Debian
• Drizzle
• Drupal
• FFmpeg
• Fluxbox
• freedesktop.org
• FreedomBox
• Gallery
• GNUstep
• GNU TeXmacs
• Haskell.org
• Jenkins
• LibreOffice
• MinGW
• OFTC
• Open Bioinformatics Foundation
• OpenEmbedded
• OpenVAS
• OpenWrt
• Open64
• PostgreSQL
• Privoxy
• SproutCore
• X.Org Foundation
• YafaRay

Number of Employees?

Their Officers + Board of Directors contains 9 people. There are many more contributing and noncontributing members

Where is HQ?

Software in the Public Interest, Inc.
P.O. Box 501248
Indianapolis, IN 46250-6248
United States

Does it have any other offices or locations?

No. Its officers and members hail from all over the world. It is an umbrella organization that works predominantly online.

Website?

spi-inc.org

Wikipedia?

Software in the Public Interest

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Yes, although only 4 were accessible from their website:

• 2004
• 2005
• 2011
• 2012

Communications

Social media for SPI

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

No social media presence

Communications channels for SPI

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

SPI-Announce mailing list. I don't see any attempt to actively get their name out into the world, but each of the contributing members and officers represent the organization at any meetings, workplaces, or conferences they attend.

SPI Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

Not regularly, but if the officers or members attend one, they’ll relay what they’ve experienced in conferences in the organization's monthly meetings.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

Project of choice: Arch Linux

The project's IRC Channel

#archlinux

Source Code repository

Source repository

Mail list archive

Mailling list

Documentation

wiki.archlinux.org

Other communication channels

planet.archlinux.org

Project Website and/or Blog

archlinux.org

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Arch is a distribution of linux that “focuses on elegance, code correctness, minimalism, and simplicity (source)

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

Began in 2002 at the hands of Judd Vinet, who wanted to create a minimalist linux distribution. The latest commit was ~1 day ago.

Who approves patches? How many people?

There are different sets of developers for different Arch repos:

• [core] and [extra] have 36 developers
• [community] has 40 developers (also called "Trusted Users")

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

See above

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

Judd Vinet stepped down in 2007 due to time constraints. Control was given to Aaron Griffin, who is the current leader today.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Judd Vinet, although he has been inactive in Arch development since 2007.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Arch linux is primarily focussed on back end development, leaving the user to install their prefered front ends. The closest thing to a frontend would be the pacman CLI, which is developed by a small subset of the primary developers.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Arch still remains popular, currently in position 9 on distrowatch

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Absolutely. There are plenty of developers working on the core system, and plenty of documentation.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Since Arch has a large base of documentation, while it would hinder its growth, others would likely be able to pick up where the core team left off. After all, Arch strives for simplicity and minimalism in its code.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

Although Arch is not tailored for users new to linux, there is a detailed Beginners Guide to help new users install the OS.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

Arch has extensive documentation in the form of a Wiki.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

• IRC in #archlinux
• Forums

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

It is a consensus between the developers, with Aaron Griffin at the helm.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Yes, collaborating with a small set of dedicated developers would be enjoyable.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

The Debian Project, with an Initial Board of Directors consisting of:

• Timothy P. Sailer
• Bruce Perens
• Ian Murdock

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Provide management of donated assets or fiscal sponsorship to it’s affiliated projects. SPI exists to organize the development and distribution of open hardware and software projects that benefit the public all over the world.

SPI provides a few basic functions:

• Accepting donations and holding funds
• Holding substantial assets
• Holding Intangible assets
• Signing Contracts for venus/insurance
• Legal counsel through the Software Freedom Law Center

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Any organization looking for the benefits of the previous answer.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Companies or organizations of open hardware and/or software that needed would otherwise fall apart due to mismanagement of funds or product.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

No, the company was incorporated in 1997 as a Non-Profit Organization and has since had no financial troubles.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

SPI takes 5% of donations

How does this organization make revenue?

See above

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Voluntary donations

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

None

Profile: Linux Foundation

Authors

• Matt Soucy (msoucy)
• Liam Middlebrook (loothelion)
• [Julien Eid (jeid64)](<mailto:jeid@csh.rit.edu)
• Aaron Herting (qwertos)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

We wanted to cover the Linux Foundation due to all of us having extensive knowledge using Linux. We wanted to know more about what they do due to our use of Linux. We all kind of chose at the same time and all agreed just because we all wanted to know more.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes

What type?

Oregon-based nonprofit mutual benefit corporation

When was it founded?

Founded 2000, Incorporated August 9th, 2007

By whom?

Info on founders is very hard to find

Publicly traded?

Private company

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

No acquisitions

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones?

"No investments"

Number of employees?

21 Leaders

Where is HQ?

HQ in San Francisco

Does it have any other offices or locations?

Also offices in Japan and Korea

Website?

linuxfoundation.org

Wikipedia?

Linux Foundation (wikipedia)

Does your organization file any annual reports?

Yearly Linux Job Reports

Communications

Social media

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Twitter: 167K Followers
• Google+: 30K Followers
• Facebook: 340K Likes
• Youtube: 43K Subscribers

Communications channels

• The Linux Foundation has a News and Blogs page here with news and other info that they would like to distribute.
• All Linux Foundation announcements can be seen here specifically.
• They also keep a list of infographics.
• They maintain a list of all publications the Linux Foundation have, including open source compliance and workshops.
• They also operate a monthly newsletter.

Conference Participation

• The Linux Foundation hosts a lot of conferences. They have 15 conferences planned from March to the end of the year.
• They also have partner conferences too where they team up with other companies to host conferences.
  • There are at least 12 until the end of the year.
• They cover a variety of topics, all of which relate to Linux somehow.
• Some conferences are colocated on the same date and location so that smaller conferences can be booked with larger conferences.
• Android Builders Summit on March 23rd
• Embedded Linux Conference on March 23rd
• ApacheCon on April 13th
• KVMForum on August 19th
• Annual Linux Kernel Summit on October 26th

Community Architecture

Communication Channels

• Linux Standard Base IRC
• kernel.org (Canonical Repository)
• Linux Kernel GitHub
• Linux Kernel Mailing List Archive

Membership

• Anyone can join
• Fee based
• Corporate
• Individual

Corporate Members

• Fujitsu
• HP
• IBM
• Intel
• and more
• About the Board of Directors

About

• Distribute the Linux kernel and other Open Source software to the public without charge.
• Initial Git commit Linux-2.6.12-rc2 April 16, 2005
• Patches are approved by kernel module subcommitees
• BDFL = Linus Torvalds

Community Participation

• Participation is increasing: YoTLD
• Passes Raptor Test (Board of Directors, set process to replace)
• Passes Bus Test (with due chaos)
• kernelnewbies.org

Technology/Product

Linux

• The Linux Foundation is centered around promoting, standardizing, and protecting Linux.
• Linux is an open source operating system used on tons of platforms ranging from small embedded devices to large clusters of servers.
• Anyone needing a non-realtime operating system kernel could benefit from using Linux.
• Massive amounts of companies have a stake in the Linux kernel as well as the Linux Foundation. There are 185 corporate members of the Linux Foundation.
• One of the main reasons Linux became so popular was that it was open sourced and GPL licensed, which wasn’t common when it was made.

Profile: Apache Software Foundation

Authors

• Caleb Coffie
• Wyatt Winters

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

We had heard of the Apache Software Foundation before just never really knew too much about it. So we just wanted to look into it more.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes

What type?

The Apache Software Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. (http://www.apache.org/foundation/)

When was it founded?

They were incorporated in 1999.(http://www.apache.org/foundation/)

By whom?

Brian Behlendorf, Ken Coar, Mark Cox, Lars Eilebrecht, Ralf S. Engelschall, Roy T. Fielding, Dean Gaudet, Ben Hyde, Jim Jagielski, Alexei Kosut, Martin Kraemer, Ben Laurie, Doug MacEachern, Aram Mirzadeh, Sameer Parekh, Cliff Skolnick, Marc Slemko, William (Bill) Stoddard, Paul Sutton, Randy Terbush, Dirk-Willem van Gulik (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation)

Original founder(s) still active?

Many of them are still active but not all.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

No.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

Not so much acquisitions but they have funded many projects. Too many to list here. Look here https://projects.apache.org/

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

In a sense

Number of Employees?

No employees but many volunteers (As many as 2663 volunteers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation)

Where is HQ?

Forest Hill, Maryland 

Does it have any other offices or locations?

None

Website?

http://www.apache.org

Wikipedia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report,

http://apache.org/foundation/news.html

Communications

Social media for Apache Software Foundation

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Twitter @theasf - 61.9K Followers
• Facebook - Seems dead, no updates since 2010, 17K likes

Communications channels for Apache Software Foundation

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

As the ASF is more of an oversight body, communications are generally done on a project level.

Apache Software Foundation Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

Yes, they organize Apachecon, and have since 2000.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

#apache on freenode (https://wiki.apache.org/general/IRC)

Source Code repository

https://svn.apache.org/

Mail list archive

https://www.apache.org/foundation/mailinglists.html

Documentation

https://wiki.apache.org/general/

Other communication channels

https://blogs.apache.org/

Project Website and/or Blog

https://www.apache.org/

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

“The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community of open-source software projects, which provide software products for the public good.” (https://www.apache.org/)

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

N/A, as the ASF is an oversight body covering a vast number of projects, each with unique commit logs.

Who approves patches? How many people?

There is a fantastically large list of commiters organized by project.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

There are 4,253 people listed on the commiters page.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

N/A. The Apache Software Foundation has an elected board of directors.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

No.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

N/A, as the organization doesn't really have a front end or back end.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

N/A, the overseeing body doesn't really have bugs, since they don't really write code.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Up, the number of current members is quite large. It may be that they don’t demote users for inactivity, so it is a false sense of growth.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Yes, the foundation is mainly run by the community so many people would be able step and take over the role.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Yes. The Apache Software Foundation board of directors is elected.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

There is a “Get Involved” landing page that directs users to further information: https://www.apache.org/foundation/getinvolved.html

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

The ASF has a “top-level” wiki. “This General Wiki is a top-level overview of other wikis at the Apache Software Foundation, as well as overall Foundation-level information, at the bottom of this page.” (https://wiki.apache.org/general/)

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

IRC would likely be the first place to go.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Consensus building.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

The ASF has extensive documentation and guides to getting started on any of the numerous projects it oversees - it seems inviting and friendly.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

The Apache Foundation is funding many different projects from donations.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

• provide a foundation for open, collaborative software development projects by supplying hardware, communication, and business infrastructure;
• create an independent legal entity to which companies and individuals can donate resources and be assured that those resources will be used for the public benefit;
• provide a means for individual volunteers to be sheltered from legal suits directed at the Foundation's projects; and,
• protect the 'Apache' brand, as applied to its software products, from being abused by other organizations. (source)

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Open Source Projects

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

The open source community and companies that use Apache licensed software.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

No.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Donations

How does this organization make revenue?

Donations

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Donations

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

The ASF invests in individual projects, so I suppose those could be counted as such.

Profile: the Free Software Foundation

Authors

• Brian Escriche (Pharas)
• Michael Tubinis (mtubinis)
• Derin Yarsuvat (Beruberufunbot)
• Chris Knepper (chrisknepper)
• Joe Trotta (h2g2guy)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

We chose to look at the Free Software Foundation mostly because of our team's interest in the organization and their overarching principles.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes, surprisingly!

What type?

501(c)(3) non-profit organization

When was it founded?

October 4, 1985

By whom?

Richard Matthew Stallman

Original founder(s) still active?

Yes, rms is the current President of the FSF

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Nope, and their legal status is “Foundation”

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

Not technically an acquisition, but one of the reasons it was founded was to continue development of the GNU Project created by its founder, Richard Stallman, which it continues to sponsor.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

The 2013 Audited Financial Statement for the FSF shows they held $264,530 in investments for fiscal year 2013.

Number of Employees?

12, including rms. There are also 7 (not including rms) members on the FSF’s Board of Directors.

Where is HQ?

Boston, MA (51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor)

Does it have any other offices or locations?

No.

Website?

https://www.fsf.org/

Wikipedia?

Here

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

2013 990 2013 Audited Financial Statement

Communications

Social media for the Free Software Foundation

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

Twitter: Here (Though it’s simply a mirror of their microblogging site) Blog: Here (Community) News: FSF RSS Feed

Communications channels for the Free Software Foundation

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

Monthly Newsletter: The Free Software Supporter Chatroom (IRC): #libreplanet on FreeNode Official Blog: Here

Free Software Foundation Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

• Annual conference: LibrePlanet
• Richard Stallman travelling the world, preaching, getting in fights, and growing beards.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

#coreboot on Freenode

Source Code repository

git clone ssh://<username>@review.coreboot.org:29418/coreboot
git clone http://[<username>:<password>@]review.coreboot.org/p/coreboot.git

also take a look at this

Mail list archive

http://www.coreboot.org/Documentation

Documentation

http://www.coreboot.org/Documentation

Other communication channels

https://www.facebook.com/coreboot

Project Website and/or Blog

• http://www.coreboot.org/
• http://blogs.coreboot.org/

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Coreboot is a fast and flexible open source firmware aimed to replace the proprietary BIOS seen in most computers by running a lightweight boot process designed to run only the necessary tasks. It is endorsed by the FSF.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

April 15th, 2003. Project started in 1999. Wednesday March 18th at 11:41 AM

Who approves patches? How many people?

Every developer can vote on what can be added. After the patch hits a specific threshold, then they will be added on their own. Certain developers have the ability to give enough votes to auto-merge a commit.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

It doesn’t appear like there has been any

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Ron Minnich

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

The project is based around creating a Free BIOS, so there isn’t really a front-end to speak of.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

“I got some help from kmalkki and he said my best bet is to disassemble the mrc blob. #### that. I know what's in it. It's ####.” ~In regards to porting a sandybridge board |from here|

How is the project's participation trending and why?

The project looks fairly consistent in terms of participation across its commit history

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Yes, as Ron doesn’t appear that active as a developer any more

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Due to how the team manages committing code and the general maturity of the project, the project looks like it would be fine.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

http://www.coreboot.org/Developer_Manual

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

http://www.coreboot.org/Documentation

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

http://www.coreboot.org/FAQ (or just irc)

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

The entire project seems fairly communal, with a few people that serve as directional influences in which way the project should go

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Endorsed by FSF; Led by Minnich.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Open source replacement of BIOS firmware that does only the bare minimum system setup necessary before handing off control to a bootloader, kernel, BIOS, or other ELF executable.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Consumers interested in a completely open and libre system could benefit, but a mature coreboot could create benefits for players pretty much everywhere in the computer manufacturing market as well.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Companies like American Megatrends and other BIOS chip providers might be concerned, because the software serves as a replacement for the software they provide on their chips.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

No major controversies regarding this software yet, to our knowledge.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Most of the FSF funding comes from patrons and members.

How does this organization make revenue?

See above.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Donations.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

None in companies, however it does have many projects.

Profile: SoftwareFreedomConservancy

Authors

• Kocsen Chung kocsen/kxc4519@rit.edu
• Will Paul dropofwill/whp3652@rit.edu
• Andrew Schott snapschott/afs7827@rit.edu

Rationale

We picked this because of the ranking system. Our team had most up to date blog posts so we picked SFC.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

No, its a not-for-profit organization 1

What type?

Not-for-profit 501(c)(3) 1

When was it founded?

2006 1

By whom?

- Karen Sandler (Executive Director) [1]
- Bradley M. Kuhn (President) [1]

Original founder(s) still active?

yes, see 3

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

No 7

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

No

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No

Number of Employees?

6 board members, 4 paid employees 1

Where is HQ?

The internet @ sfconservancy.org

Does it have any other offices or locations?

N/A

Website?

http://sfconservancy.org/about/

Wikipedia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Freedom_Conservancy

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

They do file annual reports. See this as an example: http://sfconservancy.org/news/2013/feb/28/publishing-annual-report/

Communications

Social media for COMPANY

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Example: Twitter: @RedHatNews - 61.9K Followers.

Twitter: @Conservancy - 710 Followers.

Communications channels for COMPANY

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each. - IRC: conservancy - NY Address - Phone: info@sfconservancy.org

SFC Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

It does not

Community Architecture

The project's IRC Channel

freenode conservancy

Source Code repository

N/A

Mail list archive

info@sfconservancy.org

Documentation

N/A

Other communication channels

N/A

Project Website and/or Blog

Blog

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

The Software Freedom Conservancy is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and FLOSS projects. They aim to provide a home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects and allow developers to focus more on developing. 1

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

Conservancy was established in 2006 and started coordinating with the BusyBox in 2007. In 2015, Conservancy announced they were funding litigation by Christoph Hellwig against VMWare for copyright violation in an ESXi product.

Who approves patches? How many people?

Conservancy is a legal team and supports FLOSS projects legally, but not in terms of patching.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

No one controls commit access - not applicable

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

The current team of directors includes: Jeremy Allison, Peter T. Brown, Mark Galassi, Bradley M. Kuhn, Mike Linksvayer, Martin Michlmayr, Stormy Peters, and Karen Sandler. The current list of project members of the Software Freedom Conservancy are: 1 - ArgoUML - Bongo - Boost - Buildbot - BusyBox - Darcs - Evergreen - Foresight Linux - Gevent - Git - GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers - Inkscape - Kallithea - K-3D - Kohana - Libbraille - LuxRender - Mercurial - Metalink - OpenChange - OpenTripPlanner - phpMyAdmin - PyPy - SWIG - Samba - Selenium - Squeak - Sugar Labs - SurveyOS - Twisted - Wine - uClibc

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

The president of the Conservancy is Bradley M. Kuhn, and the executive director is Karen Sandler. 1

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

N/A

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

For major lawsuits see “Future and Law”

How is the project's participation trending and why?

The Conservancy appears to be popular amongst larger FLOSS projects who need the legal side of Open Source dealt with.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Seeing that there is a group of directors, the Conservancy would very likely pass the Raptor test.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

The Conservancy would take a big hit if they lost their directors due to a bus accident, but seeing as the backing members are mostly heavily invested large FLOSS projects, the members would probably see that the Conservancy was restored with new lawyers.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

Each application for a partner project are handled on a case by case basis. To become part of it you would have to reach out to them.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

See About -

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

Email

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

The main decision makers are the board of directors. SFC can be considered as a lawyer group dedicated to helping open source projects. Decisions ultimately are ruled by this small group, keeping the project owners stake in mind for the best interest of FOSS and the values it represents.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Offers Legal Help

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Lawyers get together to help Open Source projects

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Open Source Development Companies

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Proprietary companies, patent trolls, people who hope to shut down FOSS projects because the Conservancy helps FOSS teams focus more on development rather than worry about legal protection.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

SFC has played important roles in several law suits.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Funded by partner projects, donations, and settlements.

How does this organization make revenue?

Partner projects make up about 10% and all other revenue is through donations and settlements. The company is not-for-profit and seeks mainly to promote innovation and progress in FOSS projects.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

The company is not-for-profit and survives off of donations and court cases, but an argument could be made for the Support Sellers model.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

None

Startups / Contemporary Issues

• CodeCombat
• Ouya
• BeagleBoard Organization
• Coinbase
• Arduino
• Lantern
• Raspberry Pi

Profile: CodeCombat

Authors

• Alex Mack amm4108/amm4108@g.rit.edu
• Katie Tigue <Kaffys/katie@mail.rit.edu

Rationale

CodeCombat is something that hits home for me. It’s a game that teaches how to code. And from what I’ve played of it, it seems to be a good game.

Organizational Details

• Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?
  • Yes
• What type?
  • Education Institution
• When was it founded?
  • 2013
• By whom?
  • Nick Winter, George Saines and Scott Erickson
• Original founder(s) still active?
  • Yes
• Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?
  • No
• Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?
  • No
• Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.
  • No
• Number of Employees?
  • 1-10
• Where is HQ?
  • San Francisco, CA
• Does it have any other offices or locations?
  • No
• Website?
  • codecombat.com
• Wikipedia?
  • Not on Wikipedia that I could find.
• Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)
  • None that I could find.

Communications

Social media for CodeCombat

• Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community. (i.e. Twitter: @RedHatNews - 61.9K Followers.
  • @codecombat - 2,329 followers
  • https://www.facebook.com/codecombat?ref=br_rs - 5,865 likes
  • https://plus.google.com/115285980638641924488/ - 1,219 followers
  • https://www.linkedin.com/company/codecombat - 43

Communications channels for CodeCombat

• What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.
  • http://blog.codecombat.com/ - This is where they announce all of their new features and new programming tournaments.

CodeCombat conference participation

• Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.
  • No they do not.

Community Architecture

If applicable, list and provide links to:

• The project's IRC Channel(Don’t use IRC)

  • https://www.hipchat.com/g3plnOKqa

• Source Code repository

  • https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat

• Mail list archive(No Mail list, but blog archive)

  • http://blog.codecombat.com/archive

• Documentation

  • https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki

• Other communication channels

  • http://discourse.codecombat.com/

• Project Website and/or Blog

  • http://blog.codecombat.com

• Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

  • The goal of this project is create a game where kids can learn to code while completing levels. It’s not meant to teach you to be an engineer, but to teach you how to intensively practice the programming fundamentals.

• Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

  • Latest commit was 10 hours ago (as of 1/2/15 9:30am)

• Who approves patches? How many people?

  • http://i.imgur.com/J1id9Yx.png

• Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

  • http://i.imgur.com/J1id9Yx.png

• Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

• Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

  • The project has two lead developers.

• Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

  • No they are different people. It looks like on the core team it’s pretty even. But as far as other contributors it’s hard to tell.

• What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

• How is the project's participation trending and why?

  • Trending up. They’ve had a lot of active users, especially with the trend of trying to get young students into STEM fields.

• In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

  • I would hope so, there are a ton of active developers.

• In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

  • Probably not. the most active 20% are people who are employed to create this game.

• Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

  • http://codecombat.com/contribute

• Even if you’re learning how to code, there are other things that you can contribute to.

  • http://codecombat.com/cla

• Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

  • yes to both https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/wiki/Component

• If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

  • Message anyone their hipchat. Or create an issue on github.

• Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

  • barely contained chaos, there are over 200 issues.

• Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

  • I would enjoy working in this. I work really well in chaotic situations.

Technology/Product (Section adapted from EFF Worksheet)

• Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?
  • It was created for Google Summer of Code 2014.
  • https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/codecombat
• What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?
  • Help kids learn how to code while playing a video game
• Who would benefit from using this technology?
  • kids who are interested in programming
• What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?
• Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

Profile: Ouya

Authors

• Fernando Ellis (fortnight)
• Andrew Mangula (ajman1101)
• Brendan Whitfield (beWhitty)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

The Ouya was a popular crowdfunded game console that seemed quite promising. However, it has gained little attention over the years. We wish to know more about Ouya Inc, and any troubles it may have had.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes, Ouya, Inc.

What type?

Corporation

When was it founded?

July 3, 2012, although its retail released happened on June 25, 2013

By whom?

BOXER8, by Julie Uhrman and Yves Behar

Original founder(s) still active?

Both Julie Uhrman, Yves Behar are still on the team

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

No

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

No

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No

Number of Employees?

31 employees (source)

Where is HQ?

11693 San Vicente Blvd., #551
Los Angeles, CA 90049
USA

Does it have any other offices or locations?

1316 3rd Street
Suite 109
Santa Monica, CA 90401

Website?

ouya.tv

Wikipedia?

Ouya

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

No, Ouya is a closed corporation

Communications

Social media for Ouya

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Twitter - 44.3K Followers
• Facebook - 99,454 Likes
• Instagram - 1,556 Followers
• Linkedin - 644 Followers
• Google - 21,141 Followers
• Youtube - 13,731 Subscribers
• Reddit - 7,978 Gamers

Communications channels for Ouya

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

• Ouya Blog - Ouya Bloggers Julie, Bawb, James, & Kellee discuss what’s new with the Ouya under the following categories: Play, Develop, News, Bawb, Events.
• Ouya Shoutouts - A Blog with links to any and all reviews, interviews, and stories about the community of Ouya developers.
• Ouya developer Forum - A resource for developers of games and applications of the Ouya console.
• Ouya Forum (unofficial) - An unofficial forum for users, developers, and community leaders to communicate with.

Ouya Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

As a whole organization, Ouya goes to GDC and IndieCade. Also, many developers go to video game related conferences individually. Including but not limited to: GDCChina, Game Connection Europe, SBGames, IndiE3, Captivate Conference, Nordic Game Conference, XOXO Conference.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

#ouya on irc.freenode.net (unofficial)

Source Code repository

Github

Mail list archive

None

Documentation

• Docs
• Github

Other communication channels

See above

Project Website and/or Blog

ouya.tv

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Ouya SDK examples is a repo showcasing games made in various game engines for developers to see what changes are needed to port their game to the Ouya game console.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

The Ouya SDK examples has its first commit on Tuesday June 4 2013. Since then, there has been a great deal of work to flesh out several example projects using a variety of technologies. Examples written in C#, JavaScript, Java, C++, and Lua. The latest commit was 20 minutes ago.

Who approves patches? How many people?

Nick Badal, Buddy, and Timothy Graupmann have commit access, and review/merge pull requests.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

For the Ouya SDK examples, only 3 pull requests have been made. Only 4 issues have been filed, and the contributors list only has 4 people.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

Yes, there has been significant turnover. Most notably, Muffi Ghadiali (VP of product development) left Ouya in 2014.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Julie Uhrman, one of the founders, and still with the company.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

The Ouya is meant to be a backend product, allowing third party developers to write their own games. Ouya’s main projects are the Ouya kernel, and the SDK examples.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Most public repos have issue trackers disabled.

To achieve the $100 price point, the Ouya carried a hardware payload inferior to most android phones at the time. A poorly designed controller also disincentivized the products adoption. The Ouya suffered from a limited game library. Many games were also playable on other existing consoles.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

The project has largely sank. It was largely attributed to a lackluster response from the development community, and bad public perception. See above for other flaws/problems with the Ouya.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Since there is a fair amount of documentation for onboarding new developers, it is likely that the public-facing project would survive the loss of the most active contributor. The internal, modified version of android, however, appears to have become proprietary.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

The public-facing project would no doubt survive, since there is extensive documentation (as explained above). The internal android system, while it does not appear to be publically available, would most likely survive. The tumultuous turnover in the core development team would suggest that the project is quite capable of being handed off to new developers.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

• ouya-sdk-examples
• docs
• developers guide
• forums

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

One of the Ouyas primary goal was to onboard new developers. See above for docs/and examples.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

• The Ouya developer forums
• The unofficial Ouya IRC: #ouya on freenode

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

It is ruled by a board of directors:

• Turi Munthe
• Roy Bahat
• Amol Sarva
• Bing Gordon

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

No, since the primary product is not open source, and is hazily ruled by a small, ever-changing board of directors.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

The Ouya was created by the CEO of Boxer8, Julie Uhrman. It was started as an internal prototype, with Yves Behar designing the product. After making their prototype, a kickstarter was started which raised $8.6M, the initial investment into the company and product.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

The Ouya is a micro-console, a small device that plays video games with any HDTV. THe console being mirco means that it will be easy to travel with, letting players bring their big screen gaming with them out of their home. It works like any other game console, it needs power and a TV with HDMI. The player just need standard game controllers, such as a wired Xbox 360 controller, PS3 controller, or game controllers used on PCs.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Media Enthusiasts that would like one device to play all their media, games, movies, TV, and music.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Nvidia was originally very interested in the Ouya. In 2013, Nvidia launched the Nvidia Shield, a portable Android gaming device that uses the same hardware in the Ouya. Nvidia could have seen the Ouya as a testing ground for their own ideas about launching game hardware. Large gaming companies such as Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Activision, and EA were also closely watching the Ouya. This console had the possibility to disrupt their business and create a new standard for consumers playing game on their TVs.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

No

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

It was crowdfunded using a kickstarter campaign, which raised $8.6M.

How does this organization make revenue?

Ouya Inc sells game consoles, controllers, and customization accessories for their hardware.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Selling hardware, and accessories.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

None

Profile: BeagleBoard Organization

Authors

• Matt Soucy (msoucy)
• Liam Middlebrook (loothelion)
• [Julien Eid (jeid64)](<mailto:jeid@csh.rit.edu)
• Aaron Herting (qwertos)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

We chose the Beaglebone organization as lots of us have used either one of their products or a similar product like the Raspberry Pi. It's a really cool company that has lots of potential for helping people get really cool embedded projects off the ground.

Organizational Details

• Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity? Yes
• What type? Texas Instruments is a Publically Trading Corporation
• When was it founded? Originally founded as Geophysical Service Incorporated (1930) Founded as Texas Instruments (1951)
• By whom?
  • GSI Founders:
    • John Clarence Karcher
    • Eugene McDermott
  • TI Founders:
    • Cecil H. Green
    • J. Erik Jonsson
    • Eugene McDermott
    • Patrick E. Haggerly
• Original founder(s) still active? All the founders are dead
• Publicly Traded? Since when? IPO: Too old to find information Current Price $56.535
• Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products? Lots of acquisitions
• as the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones? TI Invests more than $80M in University Research Projects
• Number of employees? 34,759 Employees as of 2012
• Where is HQ? HQ in Dallas Texas
• Does it have any other offices or locations? Locations Worldwide
• Website? ti.com
• Wikipedia? Texas Instruments Wikipedia
• Does your organization file any annual reports? TI Annual Reports

Communications

Social media

• Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.
  • IRC
  • Twitter: 6K Followers

Communications channels

• What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public?
• Beagleboard has a blog that they have some announcements on as well as showing cool new projects.
• Beagleboard has a few mailing lists and forums.
• They also operate a video tutorial website for common issues people have.

Conference Participation

• Beagleboard maintains a list of conferences as well as [what was presented here][Slideshows].
• Typically the conferences have to do with embedded Linux applications and the talks are given by various people in the Beagleboard community.
• Some of the conferences they have presentations at are:
  • Embedded Linux Conference
  • Maker Faire Bay Area
  • SCALE

Slideshows

Community Architecture

• IRC
• Source Code
• Forums
• Documentation
• Project Website
• Provides a kernel for BeagleBoard and BeagleBone devices
• Repository is large enough that it defies analysis
• Encorporates the Linux kernel
• Large number of contributors as a result, but few pull requests for the repository itself
• This repository's main differences are the BeagleBone specific drivers, etc
• Documentation for submitting patches is from the original Linux kernel
  • Uses upstream changes, but non-upstream contributions must be BeagleBone-specific
• Hierarchical, one component of mainline Linux development

Callaway Coefficient of Fail

• Hard to apply to open hardware projects as much of the code written specifically for the project are spread throughout forks of other projects.
• Source Control
  • Public (Github +0)
  • Webviewer (Github +0)
  • Source control tool (Git +0)
• Communication
  • Announce releases (Newsletter, Github +0)
  • Bug tracker (Github +0)
  • Website (beaglebone.org +0)

Bus Test

• The GitHub organization only has 4 people on it. Fail.

Technology/Product

Beaglebone Boards

• Beagleboardorg has created several "boards" that are typically used in embedded Linux applications.
• Their current most popular board is the BeagleBone Black which is based off of an ARM chipset and runs Linux.
• The BeagleBone Black can be expanded by things called "Capes" which are attachments that can provide various additional functionality.
• Their older boards are the BeagleBoard, Beagleboard XM, and the BeagleBone.
• Over the years due to embedded technology getting better, their products have gotten cheaper and more powerful.

Profile: Coinbase / Coinbase

Authors

• Kocsen Chung kocsen/kocsenc@gmail.com
• Andrew Schott snapschott/afs7827@rit.edu
• Will Paul dropofwill/whp3652@rit.edu

Rationale

Fairly arbitrary, but Will is a Coinbase user so we went for it.

Coinbase Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes, Coinbase is a corporation.

What type?

NOT Publicly traded

When was it founded?

2012

By whom?

Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam

Original founder(s) still active?

Yes

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

N/A

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

• Blockr.io - Raw transaction processor
• Kippt - Design firm

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No

Number of Employees?

101-250 Employees, 52 Team members, 3 adisors

Where is HQ?

San Francisco, California, U.S.

Does it have any other offices or locations?

Several [headquarters across the world][7] with smaller offices and retail stores throughout.

Website?

www.Coinbase.com

Wikipedia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinbase

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

No

Communications

Social media for Coinbase

They have a extended social media presence.

Facebook: 17,270 likes

Twitter: 50,700 Followers

GitHub

Communications channels for Coinbase

IRC Channel: freenode #Coinbase

GitHub Repository Link:
[https://github.com/coinbase/toshi]

Email: through inquiry - https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/emails/new

Blog/Website: Blog - https://blog.coinbase.com

Website - https://www.Coinbase.com/

Conference Participation

Coinbase has decent amount of conference participation. Such as Money2020 and other BitCoin related conferences.

Community Architecture

History

Coinbase started when the bitcoin surge came about. It raised a lot in venture capital through Y-Combinator and it became an easy way to deal with your bitcoin wallet, and one of the early ones as well. It all started by the original founders in San Francisco, CA. Coinbase grew quick to about 1 million users in 2014 and has ever since gotten strong momentum

License(s)

Toshi - MIT Most other repos - MIT

###Getting commit/review access The people in charged of commit access of coinbase are found here: https://github.com/orgs/coinbase/people

Getting Messy with Code

This process is done through their GitHub organization repo.

Git by a bus?

Passes, because there are a handful of people that own the repo.

Overview & Product

Coinbase is a company that builds great apps to interface with the bitcoin world. It’s major product is the bitcoin wallet they create which is a place where you can buy and sell bitcoin. It facilitates the process and basically slaps on a beautiful UI on the bitcoin system.

How this company relates to open source is unique, but also relevant since its one of the ‘young’ companies that integrate and revolve around open source. So they have an organization on github. This organization has a ton of projects, one of the largest ones being toshi. This repo is an implementation of the Bitcoin protocol in Ruby. It is what powers coinbase and they help drive the project forward. There are currently 6 owners of the coinbase org in GH, so that leads me to believe they are the lead devs. The company is also making money and hires people to keep major development.

Its a great example of a company that is literally paid to create and support FOSS software. Now I’m sure there are ‘secret puddings’ in the company that they keep private which is where the trick comes in. Similarly they are the ‘data holders’ of all the user base and all of peoples transactions which makes them valuable.

Business and Revenue Model

Coinbase got most its funding mostly from venture capital. Once the product was created, Coinbase created a similar service such as Visa. Where 1% of all charges that go through are charged as a fee.

Profile: Arduino

Authors

• Caleb Coffie
• Wyatt Winters

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

Arduino has a huge influence on the maker community. This community is very open to FOSS. The team was wanting just learn more about Arduino and the the relationship between Atmel and Arduino.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes

What type?

Corporation

When was it founded?

1984

By whom?

George Perlegos

Original founder(s) still active?

No, he was actually fired. (source)

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Yes, since 1991. Started at 13.50, currently 8.53 as of 2015-03-18. (source)

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

1. Quantum Research Group Ltd. (Capacitive Sensing)
2. Advanced Digital Design S.A (Power line communication)
3. Smart metering product lines of IDT Corporation (Metering)
4. Newport Media (IoT) (source)

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

None found.

Number of Employees?

5000

Where is HQ?

1600 Technology Drive
San Jose, California 95110

Does it have any other offices or locations?

Numerous locations

Website?

http://www.atmel.com/

Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmel

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Yes, they are all conveniently organized here

Communications

Social media for Atmel / Arduino

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Atmel:
  • Twitter: @Atmel - 32.3K followers
  • LinkedIn: 29K followers
• Arduino:
  • Twitter: @arduino - 125K followers

Communications channels for Atmel / Arduino

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

• Since Atmel is a gigantic corporation, this doesn’t cleanly apply.
• They do have a blog: http://blog.atmel.com/

Atmel / Arduino Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

• Atmel has a nicely organized list of past conference appearances.
• Arudino organizes an Arudino Day.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

#arduino on freenode

Source Code repository

GitHub

Mail list archive

Google Groups

Documentation

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Documentation

Other communication channels

Forums: http://forum.arduino.cc/

Project Website and/or Blog

http://www.arduino.cc/

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Arduino - Create an easy to use open hardware made for makers.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

• Initial commit: Thu Aug 25 21:06:28 2005 +0000
• Latest commit: Likely within 24 hours

Who approves patches? How many people?

Many people approve patches on their github repo. At first glance it looks like there are 15 people who can merge.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

About 15 have commit access and there are currently over 400 pull requests.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

It seems many of the contributors only contribute for a short period of time. There are only a couple people who have continually contributed. https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/graphs/contributors

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

No there have been many people with commit access access and many of the developers have contributed.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

N/A

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

There is a dedicated bug tracking forum here.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

It is increasing slowly. https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/graphs/contributors

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Yes, it would survive because there are others that are actively contributing to the project and know their way around the project.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

It would probably survive but would take a while to recover.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

• The IDE itself has significant documentation.
• If you’re looking to contribute to the project I can’t seem to find anything besides their Contributor License Agreement

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

Yes. It’s everywhere on their official site and even on the 3rd party sites explaining how to use arduinos.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

Probably the IRC channel. #arduino on freenode

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

It seems like the project is ruled by a small group.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

The community structure seems stable, and are continually on top of pull requests and issues.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Arduino

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Easy to use microcontrollers. Many Makers use the microcontrollers for various different projects.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Anyone trying to break in using hardware in a project.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Startups or companies with small teams that need to prototype hardware projects.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

Copyright plays a part with it being open hardware. They open the code up to anyone to use on their own boards.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Unknown, actually.

How does this organization make revenue?

Selling / licensing hardware

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Widget Frosting

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

Covered above.

Profile: Lantern

Authors

• Michael Tubinis (mtubinis)
• Brian Escriche (Pharas)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

We chose the Lantern project because the project has an admirable goal and it seemed like it would be cool to learn more about how it works. Simple as that.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes, surprisingly! It is called the Brave New Software Project, Inc.

What type?

A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

When was it founded?

In 2010.

By whom?

Adam Fisk

Original founder(s) still active?

Yes

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Not publicly traded.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

No acquisitions

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No investments

Number of Employees?

Roughly 6

Where is HQ?

N/A

Does it have any other offices or locations?

N/A

Website?

getlantern.org

Wikipedia?

Wikipedia: Lantern (software)

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

None that we could find.

Communications

Social media for Lantern

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Twitter 4077 followers. 793 tweets.
• Facebook 6451 likes.
• Tumblr

Communications channels for Lantern

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

It honestly seems like most communication just happens on the repository issue tracker or through private emailing. There are also the [forums](Forums - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lantern-users-en).

Lantern Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

Lantern does not seem to participate in any conferences.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

N/A

Source Code repository

Github

Mail list archive

N/A

Documentation

Documentation Wiki

Other communication channels

team@getlantern.org (email not mailing list)

Project Website and/or Blog

getlantern.org

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Lantern is built by the Brave New Software Project, Inc, a registered 501c3 non-profit dedicated to using software to tackle tough global challenges. Brave New Software’s founder and Lantern lead developer, Adam Fisk, was formerly a lead developer of the peer-to-peer file sharing services LimeWire and LittleShoot. While working on these P2P architectures, Adam realized they could be useful in providing unfiltered internet access.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

The Initial Commit for the project is on July 7th, 2010. The latest commit was on May 18th, 2015.

Who approves patches? How many people?

There are 6 people who can approve of patches, though two seem to be the most active.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

Other than the 6 who can approve patches, there are only 11 other people with a history of commits to the project all together, and between them there is only around 100 commits.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

According to the github repo graphs, myleshorton has been the leader since the project started. From october 2013 on, oxtoacart has joined and contributed alot of code development. These two have since then stayed and contributed steadily as the core team members.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Adam Fisk

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

According to the commit history, it seems like the answer is yes, as there are so few commits outside of the top two contributors

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Issue Tracker. Of note is an issue with Reset not working properly and messsing with people’s ability to work the software: Issue 1841.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Github contributor graph. It seems to have gone down as time has went on, though that has probably more to do with having less and less project critical work to do. That said, there are still several open issues and development has seemed to recently picked up again after a long hault.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

No, from what we can tell, only 2 people have really contributed to the repo code wise, and even then the BDFL has had a lot more commits and has worked on the project way longer than the second leading contributor.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Probably not. If the two main contributors were removed then the project would fall, due to most of the development knowledge being lost. Also, the project is fairly new, has not left beta stage yet, and has weak documentation. These factors will only hinder the project if it tries to revive itself.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

The wiki has links to a Get Involved page and other various links that will help people start contributing towards the project.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

The project does have documentation but it is weak, and no code samples are present other than some basic terminal / command line code to set up the project on various platforms.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

I would head to the forums first as that seems to be the most active communication area.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

The entire project is run by the BDFL Adam Fisk.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Hard to say, as it really doesn’t have a formal structure outside of “There is this thing to work on, someone should work on it”.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

The project was started by Adam Fisk.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

It was designed with the intention of spreading internet to those who would normally not be able to receive it.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

People in countries with heavily censored Internet (i.e. China, Iran).

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Interestingly enough, Google has stepped forward with something similar in uProxy. This was worked on collaboratively with Adam Fisk in some regard, so not quite the same thing though.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

Has been strongly opposed by China, but otherwise, mostly silent. There has been some concern over the funding coming from the State department however.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

There is no information as to how the project was originally funded.

How does this organization make revenue?

Lantern is currently making revenue via donations through their Indiegogo campaign.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

• Donations
• Crowdfunding

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

No investments and no acquisitions.

Profile: Raspberry Pi

Authors

• Chris Knepper
• Derin Yarsuvat
• Joe Trotta

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

The Raspberry Pi is a well-known open hardware device, used in a variety of contexts. It helps kids learn programming, is used as the brain of many DIY/physical computing projects, and because it is so cheap, serves to help people get a computer who otherwise might not be able to afford one. The organization responsible for the device is a registered charity.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes.

What type?

A charitable organization (officially registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales, UK registered charity 1129409).

When was it founded?

May of 2009 (Board of trustees was assembled in years prior to this, though).

By whom?

Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang, Alan Mycroft, Pete Lomas, and David Braben

Original founder(s) still active?

Yes, although Eben became CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd, responsible for engineering and trading activities, so the current CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation is Lance Howarth.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Nope, nope, nope.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

Not that we could find.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

Not in the traditional sense…according to the UK Charity Commission website, they have £0 investment income and £0 investment spending, though they have £1 of “long term investment” assets. They also partner with element14, Egoman, RS Components, and Allied Electronics for distribution of the Pi.

Number of Employees?

4, according to the UK Charity Commission website, though the same site also lists 6 members on its Board of Trustees.

Where is HQ?

Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom

Does it have any other offices or locations?

No.

Website?

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Summary Information Return (2013) Accounts (a.k.a. Trustees’ Report and Financial Statements) (2013)

Communications

Social media for Raspberry Pi

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Example: Twitter: @RedHatNews - 61.9K Followers.

• https://twitter.com/Raspberry_Pi(205K Followers)

• https://plus.google.com/+raspberrypi/posts (850K Followers)

• https://www.facebook.com/raspberrypi (112K Likes)

Communications channels for Raspberry Pi

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

• Github, educational Github – Software repos…the former focuses on Pi core software, the latter is comprised of educational projects and demos.
• YouTube, Vimeo – Promotional and educational videos about the Pi.
• http://www.raspberrypi.org/community/ – Links to blogs, magazines, and other Pi-centric media.
• http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/

Raspberry Pi Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

“Raspberry Jam” – Many events are organized by enthusiasts and the community and are endorsed by the RPF, but not organized by the RPF.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

#raspberrypi on freenode

Source Code repository

Not applicable, though they do have a github repository for supplemental software (See: Communications channels)

Mail list archive

None

Documentation

http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/

Other communication channels

See above links pertaining to Raspberry Pi Foundation

Project Website and/or Blog

See above links pertaining to Raspberry Pi Foundation

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Primarily aimed towards children looking to learn programming in a risk-free environment. Built to run modern OSs and have advanced graphical capabilities. Hackable. Can be used for a variety of applications.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

The first prototype was built in 2006. The newest model was released in February 2015.

Who approves patches? How many people?

The 6 trustees at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, plus the CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

Not applicable.

See abov

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

The original people are mostly still involved.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

No, although Eben Upton is essentially the godfather of the Pi.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Not applicable.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Not applicable.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

The RPF doubled their income YoY last year, so pretty good. The Pi is one of the most popular SoC devices in the world, at a similar level of proliferation as the Arduino.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Yes. Several people were involved in the creation and are Pi trustees. Plus, the concept would survive, as there are competing devices to the Pi.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Yes. There would be some difficultly in replacing them, but since the charity, trading company, concept, and software ecosystem are all established and involve countless individuals, the Pi would live on.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

Yes, at http://www.raspberrypi.org/resources/

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/ It is extensive and has code examples, but some of the pages could use expansion.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

Not applicable.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Ruled by a small group for sure.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Yes, these people are doing a fantastic deed; enhancing computer education and providing a great tool for DIY hacks in the process.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang, Alan Mycroft, Pete Lomas, and David Braben, plus the University of Cambridge and Broadcom Corporation.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Provide an accessible and affordable computer to aid in computer education, and inspire/support cool open source projects, often involving physical computing.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Everyone! Students, teachers, hackers, people who watch videos from their computer.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Schools and universities with computer education programs, because the number of Computer Science applicants was declining YoY. Software development firms are also interested, because of its disruptive potential.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

Not really. Raspberries are copyright 145-66 Ma nature.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Sponsorship from 3rd parties.

How does this organization make revenue?

It is an educational charity. Most of their revenue would come from corporate sponsors and sales of the Pi.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

"Partnership with funding organizations" is the one most applicable, as the raspberry pi is developed by a community of volunteers, but manufactured and distributed through corporate sponsors.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

None that we could find.

Crowdfunding / Crowdfunded

• BountySource
• Patreon
• IndieGoGo
• Flattr
• Gratipay
• Kickstarter

Profile: BountySource

Authors

• Alex Mack (amm4108)
• Liam Middlebrook (loothelion)
• Julian Eid (jeid64)
• Matt Soucy (msoucy)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

One of our fellow students from the box has made a decent amount of money collecting bounties and we wanted to learn more about what goes on behind that process.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes

What type?

Incorporated in 2003 in the State of California

By whom?

• Warren Konkel
• David Rippo

Original founder(s) still active?

Unknown

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Not on Stock Market

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

Unknown

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

Unknown

Number of Employees?

Unknown

Where is HQ?

Unknown

Does it have any other offices or locations?

Unknown

Website?

answer BountySource.com

Wikipedia?

Wikipedia: BountySource

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant docum ents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

• Funded by Konkel and True Global Ventures
• No Annual Reports

Communications

Social media for BountySource

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• [IRC](FreeNode, #bountysource)
• Twitter: 2K Followers
• Facebook: 350 Likes.

Communications channels for BountySource

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

• Bountysource has a blog where they show off top developers and new announcements.
• Bountysource has a Stats page to show off what’s going on the website.
• They also have a Press page that shows off news articles that feature Bountysource.

BountySource Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

Could not find any conferences, tons of conferences getting funded on Bountysource though.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions:

The project's IRC channel

#bountysource

Source code repository

Source Code

Mail list archive

N/A

Documentation

Documentation

Other communication channels

Email

Project website and/or blog

• Blog

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals

"Bountysource is the funding platform for open-source software. Users can improve the open-source projects they love by creating/collecting bounties and pledging to fundraisers."

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

First commit was Aug 26, 2012. Latest commit was Apr 28, 2015

Who approves patches? How many people?

Unknown

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

• There have been 30 contributors to this project.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

The core team seems to have stayed fairly constant up until recently.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Cory Boyd is the lead developer for this project.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Solely frontend project

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Cory Boyd

How is the project's participation trending and why?

All participation ended for almost 6 months, and is only just now starting to pick back up.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

The project would most likely survive but wouldn't be updated for awhile if Cory were eaten by a raptor.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

The project would most likely survive but wouldn't be updated for awhile if the core team was hit by a bus.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

There doesn't seem to be any straight on-boarding process.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

The project has some documentation but nothing to help a newbie jump in.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

One of the core contributors, in an issue on GitHub

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Currently it is ruled by a pair of individuals, David Rappo and Warren Konkel.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

No, too disorganized for a newbie to jump into easily

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Unknown

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

• Originally started for only open source bounties.
• Initially hosted Subversion repos for projects.
  • Development on this version stopped in 2008.
• Reopened in 2012 to work with GitHubs API’s in order to reach a wider audience. Allows Bitcoin, Paypal, and credit card for funding.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

• Larger open-source projects with financial backing
• Smaller projects with a dedicated community

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Most companies would probably not be concerned about a developer leaving the company to collect bounties full-time, because it would be difficult to consistently use bounties to make a living.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

Unknown

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Unknown

How does this organization make revenue?

Unknown

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Unknown

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

Unknown

Profile: Patreon

Authors

• Fernando Ellis (fortnight)
• Andrew Mangula (ajman1101)
• Brendan Whitfield (beWhitty)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

Patreon is a popular crowdfunding service that recently acquired Subbable. We wish to learn the details involved in operating a crowdfunding

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes

What type?

Private Company

When was it founded?

May 2013

By whom?

• Jack Conte
• Sam Yam

Original founder(s) still active?

Both are still active

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

No, it is not publically traded

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

Patreon recently acquired Subbable in March of 2015.

Their core product is their website, which allows you to subscribe to one of their “Creators” and fund products through them. The website itself only takes enough money to support its servers and amazon’s payment system. The rest goes to the creator that you would be supporting.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No

Number of Employees?

21 Employees, Here's a sampling:

• Jack Conte - CEO
• Sam Yam - President and Tech Head
• Amanda Smock - Head of People Ops and HR
• Jesse Wolfe - Engineer Extraordinaire
• Kathy Zheng - Designer of All Things
• Marcos Gaeta - Engineer Fantastique

Where is HQ?

San Francisco, United States

Does it have any other offices or locations?

No

Website?

patreon.com

Wikipedia?

Patreon

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

They are private and don’t publish their annual reports

Communications

Social media for Patreon

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Youtube - 2856 Subscribers
• Twitter - 28.7k Followers
• Facebook - 45031 likes
• Instagram - 1140 Followers
• Patreon on Patreon - 150 Patrons
• Patreon press

Communications channels for Patreon

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

The blog and the youtube are the primary means of public outreach:

• Patreon on Patreon - 150 Patrons
• Youtube - 2856 Subscribers

Patreon Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

No

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

No official IRC channel

Source Code repository

Can’t see it; They’re a private company

Mail list archive

Can’t see it; They’re a private company

Documentation

Can’t see it; They’re a private company

Other communication channels

See above

Project Website and/or Blog

patreon.com

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Patreon is crowdfunding site allowing content creators to collect funding from their “Patrons”. Patreon allows for lone and recurring donations from the patrons, and takes a 5% commision. Content creators range from youtube stars, musicians, to podcasters.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

Patreon was founded on May 7th, 2013 by Jack Conte. Since then it has not had any major changes in design, usability, or functionality. As it is not software, there are no regular commits.

Who approves patches? How many people?

Jack Conte and Sam Yam

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

Can’t see it; They’re a private company

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

No, Jack Conte and Sam Yam are still with the company, and it has continued to grow.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Jack Conte and Sam Yam

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

No, they have different people for development, design, and HR. They have more developers than designers.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Rather than having bugs/issues, patreon more often than not will have problems with the posts of users. In December 2014 there was a policy change to no longer allow pornographic photography, but NSFW content in other forms is still allowed on the site. Now there is currently a system in place where users can request moderators to mark “strikes” on creator’s content. Accumulate enough strikes, and you can have your account suspended.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

It has been doing well. It gained 125,000 patrons in the first 18 months. Recurring pledges continue to increase.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Yes, it would survive. While there may be a brief period of chaos while new moderators step in, most of the infrastructure is already in place, and would continue to run. In terms of the web development, since the site isn’t very intensive, or unique, it’s likely that new developers could pick up the code base quickly.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

The company would have a period of several months when content isn’t as heavily moderated, the website might not support so much traffic, and the back-end wouldn’t be patched, but the company could hire new employees and continue their services.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

Simply sign up for an account. Any questions can likely be answered from the FAQ.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

Patreon maintains a helpful FAQ with answers to questions regarding Creators and Patrons.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

FAQ with information that might help. Depending on the blocker, you could also email privacy@patreon.com or copyright@patreon.com

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

The company is a small group, led by Jack Conte (the CEO), and Sam Yam (President & Head of Technical).

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

As an artistic creator, it would be pretty nice; the concept of the website is to give artists enough monetary support to have a sustainable income for their work. As a back-end developer or moderator, I don’t know about their system, as they are a private company.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Jack Conte and Sam Yam created Patreon in May 2013. That August they raised $1.3M in VC Funding. Patreon was founded so that founder Jack Conte could monetize his popular Youtube channel.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Creators/Artists can create an account and showcase their work. Artists can set a monthly limit that users can give them a month, attaching rewards/gifts to different tiers if they would like. Artists receive their pledges at the start of every month and can use them as they see fit, no financial records are need to be shown to Patreon or the artist’s pledging users. Patreon charges a flat 5% fee on all pledges.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Artists in any medium would benefit from this technology, as well as open source developers. As users pledge each month, this could be used a supplemental income at first for an artist and if they receive enough pledges, it could become their full income.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Record labels, content networks, and other organizations that host and promote artist on any medium are probably very concerned as Patreon is cutting them out as middlemen and giving artists an avenue to their fans.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

There have been no copyright cases/controversies surrounding patreon.

Who are some of the users of this service?

• Youtubers & Musicians:
  • Jack Conte (the CEO of Patreon)
  • Pentatonix
  • CGP Grey
  • SciShow
  • Corridor Digital
  • Minute Physics
• A handful of developers:
  • openfl
  • libgdx
  • queenofspace
  • freebsdgirl
  • benlehman

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Patreon recieved $2.1 million in funding from venture capitalists and angel investors.

How does this organization make revenue?

Patreon recieves 5% from every pledge made. Users can also donate directly to Patreon (using Patreon).

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Voluntary donations

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

Patreon recently acquired Subbable in March of 2015.

Profile: IndieGoGo

Authors

• Michael Tubinis (mtubinis)
• Brian Escriche (Pharas)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

IndieGoGo was one of the very few crowdfunding organizations that was not limited to a certain theme. They will literally help you fund almost any idea you can think of.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes, Indiegogo Inc.

What type?

A “Funding Platform that does Seed Investments”.

When was it founded?

January of 2008

By whom?

Founded by Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin (Current CEO), and Eric Schell.

Original founder(s) still active?

The founders are still active.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

The company is not publicly traded.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

The company has made 0 acquisitions.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

The company has invested $25,000 in UCreate3D

Number of Employees?

Roughly 80 Employees

Where is HQ?

965 Mission St (btwn 5th & 6th), 
San Francisco, 
CA 94103, 
United States

Does it have any other offices or locations?

No other addresses

Website?

Indiegogo.com

Wikipedia?

Wikipedia: Indiegogo

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

No annual reports that we could find.

Communications

Social media for IndieGoGo

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Facebook - 321,668 likes.
• Twitter - 218k followers, 18.6k tweets.
• Google+ - 291k followers, 3.185 million views
• Instagram - 261 posts, 5,982 followers
• Linkedin - 6,710 followers

Communications channels for IndieGoGo

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

IndieGoGo has a Blog that contains up to date posts about IndieGoGo news. Their Facebook and Twitter pages are also used to help promote some of the various projects that get put up using their service.

IndieGoGo Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

Connected Conference - IndieGoGo will be attending to host a crowdfunding competition.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

IndieGoGo does not have a single repository, but rather has helped several different open source projects fund themselves. The one we will look at is PDFy, a PDF hosting service.

The project's IRC Channel

N/A

Source Code repository

GitHub Repo

Mail list archive

N/A

Documentation

N/A

Other communication channels

N/A

Project Website and/or Blog

pdf.yt

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

PDFy exists to offer a place where anybody can instantly upload and share a PDF, much like Imgur does for images. PDFy is free, ad-free, and non-commercial.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

Initial commit was on April 26, 2014. The latest commit was on August 5, 2014.

Who approves patches? How many people?

Just our BDFL joepie91.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

Again, our BDFL (joepie91) has most of the commits. There is however one other contributer who contributed 1 line of code, jedahan

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

There is only the BDFL really, who has not changed

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

The BDFL is joepie91.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Yes, there is only 1 developer.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

The BDFL controls bug control and repair. There have been no major issues so far. Issue tracker can be viewed here.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Throughout the project's history, it has been actively developed by the BDFL with no real breaks. However development has stopped on August 5, 2014 and has not picked up since. Development seems to have switched over to pdfy2, a node.js port of pdfy.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Since there is only one developer, the project would not survive the raptor test.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

See the above answer.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

There is no on-boarding process.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

There is no documentation other than the github readme file which explains how to set up the project.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

You would have to contact the BDFL. Looks like most communications are done on the github issue tracker.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Ruled by the BDFL.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Since the project is run by a single individual and is apparently dead, I would not enjoy working on this project.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

The idea of Crowdfunding was conceived before the internet. There are several examples in history where funds were raised by a large crowd of donors. The term 'crowdfunding' was introduced in 2006, and crowdfunding websites appeared as early as 2003 after the launch of ArtistShare.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

IndieGoGo is meant to allow people to start up any idea they want and crowdsource the funds from other people. Generally speaking, IndieGoGo is used to give ideas that normally wouldn’t get anywhere a chance in the light.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Anybody can start a campaign. More directly, people who need just a little more funding before they can launch their project.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

The biggest concern about crowdsourcing in general is that legitimate startups circumvent the need for Venture-capital. This is merely postponing it, as the startups hit the point at which they need to expand.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

There has been some controversy surrounding IndieGoGo, but little to none of it has to do with copyright law. Namely IndieGoGo now no longer has the same fraud guarantees.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

The company has raised revenue from some financing rounds. The earliest one was in September 2011, where the company raised $1.5 million, a round led by Metamorphic Ventures, ff Venture Capital, MHS Capital and Steve Schoettler, Zynga's co-founder.

How does this organization make revenue?

IndieGoGo charges 9% on the funds you raise. If you meet your goal, you get 5% of them back. More information can be found at their Fees & Pricing page.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Pre-order/crowdfunding/reverse-bounty model

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

The company has made no acquisitions but has invested $25,000 in UCreate3D.

Profile: Flattr

Authors

• Caleb Coffie (C_Coffie)
• Wyatt Winters (wywin)
• Aaron Herting (qwertos)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

Flattr was company that we had never heard of before and wanted to learn more about the platform.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Flattr is the corporate entity

What type?

Limited Corporation

When was it founded?

March 2010

By whom?

Peter Sunde (of The Pirate Bay fame) and Linus Olsson

Original founder(s) still active?

Yes

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Flattr is not publically traded.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

Flattr hasn't made any acquisitions.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No they have not.

Number of Employees?

<10, 3 listed on Crunchbase. (source1) (source2)

Where is HQ?

Malmö Sweden, and London

Does it have any other offices or locations?

It is unclear which office is primary

Website?

https://flattr.com

Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

None

Communications

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community. (i.e. Twitter: @RedHatNews - 61.9K Followers.)

• Twitter: @flattr - 10.6K Followers
• Facebook: flattrcom - 14k Likes
• Google+: +flattr - 1.7k Followers

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

Social medias, and their blog: http://blog.flattr.net/

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

None

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions:

If applicable, list and provide links to:

The project's IRC Channel

#flattr on freenode with a max of 5 users in the past year

Source Code repository

Closed Source but has a github account that host many flattr plugins github

Mail list archive

None

Documentation

API documentation

Other communication channels

Website contact form

Project Website and/or Blog

• Website - https://flattr.com
• Blog - http://blog.flattr.net/

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Flattr is micro-donation system to that looks to help support creators.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

• Launched in March 2010 as invite only and went public in August.
• December 2010 Allowed users to donate to wikileaks after Paypal, Visa, MasterCard started canceling payments.
• April 2011, Allowed for users to receive donations without having to send a donation to someone. source

Who approves patches? How many people?

This is not applicable because it is business and it isn't open source.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

This is not applicable because it is business and it isn't open source.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

• leihog - Leif Högberg
• smgt - Simon Gate

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

The founders? - Peter Sunde and Linus Olsson. This is unknown because it is a private company.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Unknown. This is a private company.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Unknown

How is the project's participation trending and why?

It looks as though the usage of the project is going down. source

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Yeah I believe the project would continue. The project is a company so when people are lost most times, people would hire others to take their place.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

People depend on Flattr to employ them and with this I think the project would continue.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

No onboarding process exists except for the documentation.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

The service has API documentation located here. There are also a few plugins on their github account that you could use as examples.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

Stackoverflow with the flattr tag or the Website contact form

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Assuming Hierarchical as it is a business.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

It’s a normal work place I’m assuming. As far as plugin development with flattr you’re pretty much on your own and you should have all the resources you would need.

Technology/Product (Section adapted from EFF Worksheet)

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Many different companies influenced this model including Kickstarter, HumbleBundle, and Gratipay

What was the technology designed to do? How was it used?

It was designed to allow people to give back to content creators

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Content Creators

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Any kind of content creator, including photographers, writers, coders, and many others even musicians.

Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

It allows people to release their content without having to worry about how they can profit from their copyright, which prospers the open source environment around the projects.

Profile: Gratipay

Authors

• Kocsen Chung kocsen/kocsenc@gmail.com
• Andrew Schott snapschott/afs7827@rit.edu
• Will Paul dropofwill/whp3652@rit.edu

Rationale

Set in class. Kocsen has researched before (gave lightning talk)

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

No, they are an Open Company.

What type?

Open Company

When was it founded?

2002

By whom?

Chad Whitacre

Original founder(s) still active?

Yes, very active

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

N/A

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

N/A

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

Nope. It kind of makes logistical investments into the Open Company foundation.

Number of Employees?

5

Where is HQ?

The internet @ gratipay.com

Does it have any other offices or locations?

N/A

Website?

https://gratipay.com/about

Wikipedia?

N/A

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant document

There is no annual report. But there are expense reports found on their documentation site.

Communications

Social media for Gratipay

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Example: Twitter: @RedHatNews - 61.9K Followers.

Communications channels for Gratipay

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

Gratipay Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

It does not as of May 2015.

Community Architecture

The project's IRC Channel

#gratipay

Source Code repository

https://github.com/gratipay

Mail list archive

support@gratipay.com

Documentation

https://github.com/gratipay

Other communication channels

• Twitter: @gratipay - 1,697 following
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Gratipay
• Email: support@gratipay.com

Project Website and/or Blog

https://medium.com/gratipay-blog

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Gratipay is all about open. The company itself is one of the first ones to become an ‘open company’. Everything is open from financials to the source code, which is pretty cool. They have very simple goals in mind and they understand they need rules, so they have those as well.

It is just a simple service to help open people support open and free software by their mean. The payment itself is open by nature and so there is no scamming involved. Just people helping people and using technology to help out.

They have some revenue on a ‘pay what you want’ basis when a user executes a payment to another user.

To preserve the simpleness of the company I will leave the overview simple.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

JAN 2012 was the initial commit up to 04/15 being the latest. Its pretty active and this all started from Chad Whittacre

Who approves patches? How many people?

Everyone who has repo owner status are shown here. There are about 12 of them

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

Everyone who has repo owner status and are shown here. There are about 12 of them

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

No, Chad is and keeps being at the center of the operation.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Yes, Chad Whitacre is at the core of the operation.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Everyone who has repo owner status and are shown here. There are about 12 of them

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Chad is usually the go-to for fixing major bugs and issues.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Its in ever-increasing trend. Because the vision is very clean. Help little by little. Not billions, not nothing. Just give out of the heart.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

No, Chad Whitacre is at the core of the team. Most accounts and formal legal monetary holdings are only owned by him.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

No. Chad Whitacre is at the core of the team. Most accounts and formal legal monetary holdings are only owned by him.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

The on-boarding is simply as easy as following their guide.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

It has pretty solid 'wiki' that you can see here.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

You would go to the IRC channel or even shoot Chad an email. They would be the ones to help. The codebase isn't to big where it's too much of an issue.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

So mostly its reigned by a small group which is lead by Chad. However the consensus is built as a small community that gratipay has built.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

It would be beneficial but not the best. Sometimes being too open is more of a hassle then it is productive.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Chad Whitacre

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Transfers small, sustainable payments.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Anyone with a bank account.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

• Small time artists, hackers and do-ers
• Banks and credit card companies

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

It did. Once upon a time, Gratipay was on the brink of not existing.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

non profit, open initiative company.

How does this organization make revenue?

Only by donations and a 'suggested' cut from the tips you give out on gratipay.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Optional Revenue Model

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

N/A

Profile: Kickstarter

Authors

• Chris Knepper
• Derin Yarsuvat
• Katie Tigue
• Joe Trotta

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

TODO

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes.

What type?

A privately held corporation.

When was it founded?

April 28, 2009.

By whom?

Perry Chen, Yanchey Strickler, and Charles Adler.

Original founder(s) still active?

Yes.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Not a publicly traded company.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

No acquisitions that we are aware of.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No investments that we are aware of.

Number of Employees?

Approximately 112, according to their website.

Where is HQ?

58 Kent Street
Brooklyn, NY 11222

Does it have any other offices or locations?

No.

Website?

https://www.kickstarter.com/

Wikipedia?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstarter

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Since this is a privately held company, they are not required to release these annual reports.

Communications

Social media for Kickstarter

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Twitter: @kickstarter - 980K followers
• Instagram: @kickstarter - 40.7K followers
• Facebook: Kickstarter - 1.1M likes
• Vine: Kickstarter - 22.3K followers

Communications channels for Kickstarter

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

• The social media listed above.
• Their website
• Their company and engineering blogs
• Happening

Kickstarter Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

• Backing and Hacking
• An engineering meetup
• They have a presence at RubyConf and RailsConf

Community Architecture

Because of the nature of crowdsourcing platforms, we chose to study one of the projects that came about thanks to Kickstarter. Here, we will cover Pebble Smartwatch.

The project's IRC Channel

#pebble on Freenode

Source Code repository

Github

Mail list archive

None.

Documentation

http://developer.getpebble.com

Other communication channels

http://developer.getpebble.com/community/

Project Website and/or Blog

https://developer.getpebble.com/blog

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

The Pebble Smartwatch was created to redefine the idea of a smartwatch. It was one of the first smartwatches to sync with a smartphone, and ended up being arguably the catalyst for interest in the smartwatch space.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

The first Kickstarter campaign was launched on April 11, 2012, and the watch was first shipped to backers in January, 2013. The latest version, Pebble Time, began its Kickstarter campaign on February 24, 2015 (the watch has not shipped yet, as of May 17, 2015).

Who approves patches? How many people?

Eric Migicovsky, Founder and CEO of Pebble and inventor of the watch, has a large say, as well as the Head of Product, Itai Vonshak, and the Head of Industrial Design, Mork Solomon.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

Not applicable -- the watch is closed source.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

The original people are still at the helm.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

No, but it is unlikely that Migicovsky will step down anytime soon.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Not applicable -- the watch is closed source.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Not applicable -- the watch is closed source.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Interest seems to only be increasing. The first Kickstarter pulled in $10.2M, while the second recieved $20.3M.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Considering the overwhelming success of the platform, and the interest in smartwatches overall, it is unlikely that any sort of disaster would leave the company unable to pick up the (time)pieces.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

See above.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

See the links to the developer resources above.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

See the links to the developer resources above.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

Not applicable -- the only way to help would be to contribute to their next Kickstarter campaign.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Ruled by a small group.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Yes, the innovative mindsets of the Pebble team have given us a cool product which has inspired competition from very large names.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Eric Migicovsky was the original creator of the Pebble watch.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

It's designed to allow users to keep in touch with their online lives without taking out a device.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

This technology would benefit both people who want to be less connected to their phones (because they can stay connected without using their phone) as well as people who want to stay hyperconnected (because they can stay connected without using their phone).

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

I think only competing smartwatch producers would be concerned about the development of the Pebble, and being that it wasn't a huge space when the Pebble was first put on Kickstarter, I don't think any stakeholders would be particularly concerned.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

No.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Venture firms and angel investors.

How does this organization make revenue?

Fees off of successful campaigns.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Not applicable -- Kickstarter is not open source.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

None.

Civic Hacking / Dark Arts

• Sugar/OLPC
• 18f
• The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)
• Tor
• Ushahidi

Profile: Sugar / OLPC

Authors

• Alex Mack amm4108/amm4108@g.rit.edu
• Matt Soucy msoucy/msoucy@csh.rit.edu
• Liam Middlebrook loothelion/liammiddlebrook@gmail.com
• Julian Eid jeid64/jeid@csh.rit.edu

Rationale

Julien is currently working on a project to upgrade the Sugar OS for the OLPC.

Organizational Details

• NGO and Non Profit Organization
• Founded May 15th, 2008
• Marco Presenti Gritti
• Bert Freudenberg
• Simon Schampijer
• Bernardo Innocenti
• Aaron Kaplan
• Christoph Derndorfer
• Tomeu Vizoso
• Not on Stock Market
• 0 Acquisitions
• 0 Investments
• Walter Bender (President)
• 100+ Volunteers
• Boston, MA
• SugarLabs.org
• Wikipedia: SugarLabs

Communications

Social media for Sugar Labs

• [IRC](Freenode, #sugar)
• Twitter: @sugarlabs - 287 Followers.

Communications channels for Sugar Labs

• Sugar has a press page that shows wherever the company or the product is mentioned in the news.
  • http://sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=press

Sugar Labs Conference Participation

• Sugar does not host any conferences but they do maintain a page where they show a bunch of talks by various people in the Sugar community.
  • http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Presentations

Community Architecture

• If applicable, list and provide links to:
  • irc://irc.freenode.net#sugar or irc://irc.freenode.net#fedora-olpc
  • Source Code repository
  • Mail list - Developers
  • Documentation
  • Sugar Labs website
  • Blog
• Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education.
• The first commit was Apr 16, 2006. The latest commit was Apr 28, 2015.
• Each core module and activity has it's own project lead and co-maintainers.
• There are 62 people who have had commits accepted into the main project.
• The core commiters have changed over time. At the beggining there were 3 major commiters who haven't added anything in awhile.
• Daniel Varvaez is the Lead maintainer for the core sugar project.
• There are different people working on the frontend and the backend.
• Participation seems to be trending down recently but there was a big push between October 2014 and January 2015.
• The project would pass the raptor test as there are multiple people running each team.
• I don't think this project would pass the bus test. The documentations isn't as detailed as it could be.
• Contributing to both the main process and adding new activities has a well documented getting started guide.
• The documentation is well broken up so you only need to look at the things for the particular thing you're doing, such as the main project or an activiy.
• I would contact the maintainers for whichever porition of the project I was working on, either by email or hopping into IRC.
• Each individual portion of Sugar has it's own ruling group.

Technology/Product

• Sugar Labs helped produce the operating system and environment that runs on the One Laptop Per Child laptops.
• Sugar OS is based off of Fedora and includes the “Sugar software.”
• Sugar software is typically written in Python which is then turned into a Sugar activity that can be installed on OLPC laptops.
• Also provide “Sugar-on-a-stick” which is a live USB based off Fedora that can be booted on any computer to use the Sugar environment.

Profile: 18f

Authors

• Fernando Ellis (fortnight)
• Andrew Mangula (ajman1101)
• Brendan Whitfield (beWhitty)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

It is exceptionally new, and atypical for a government program. We wish to know more about it.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

No, part of government

What type?

Organization within the General Services Administration

When was it founded?

March 19, 2014

By whom?

GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini

Original founder(s) still active?

Aaron Snow

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

No, not even on crunchbase

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

Nope

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

Nope

Number of Employees?

59

Where is HQ?

General Services Administration Building
1800 F Street NW
Washington, D.C.

Does it have any other offices or locations?

No

Website?

18f.gsa.gov

Wikipedia?

18f

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Doesn’t look like it. The github repo speaks for itself.

Communications

Social media for 18f

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Twitter - 8431 followers

Communications channels for 18f

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

They have several active bloggers, at their news site. Internally, 18f uses Slack for their communication. They have several rooms, such as: #general, #teamops, #wg-working_groups

18f Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

Not as an organization, but the employees that work there do attend conferences and write blog posts about them.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

Nope

Source Code repository

GitHub

Mail list archive

Subscribed at the 18f news site

Documentation

They hold multiple GitHub repositories for documentation and tools. For example:

• midas
• openFEC-documentation
• hub
• api-standards

Other communication channels

Nope

Project Website and/or Blog

• My USA
• Analytics
• Midas

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

• my.usa.gov - An easier way for Americans to sign in to and manage their interactions with federal websites.
• analytics.usa.gov - A lightweight system for publishing analytics data from Google Analytics profiles.
• midas-dev.18f.us - Connects people from across and within government agencies to collaborate on projects.
• C2 - Making government acquisition more efficient by empowering P-Card holders and GSA Advantage users.
• openFEC - An experiment in taking data from the Federal Election Commission and harmonizing/cleaning it up to make it easier for external developers to use and analyze.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

They have many projects. To see initial and latest commits, go to the individual repos for their projects. As opposed to other companies, the developers come up with ideas for new projects that can be applied on many levels. Managers then go find other people to work on the projects, and delegate the work amongst them, keeping time and release cycles flowing. analytics.usa.gov is an example of a project that applies to many levels, as there are more sites like it at city and state levels.

Who approves patches? How many people?

The 75 people viewable from their repo list

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

We don’t know, their core team isn’t so clear since they work on so many projects simultaneously.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Unclear. Aaron Snow is the only listed employee on Crunchbase, was one of the founders, and is still working with them.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Many of the developers at 18f are skilled in both frontend and backend roles. Most developers are skilled with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Python.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Healthcare.gov - USDS is the government’s sector responsible for quality control and bug repair on all its digital services.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

They are trending well. Several of their repos on github have over 200 stars.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

Yes, they have many projects, all spearheaded by different people. Also, the managers are there to find new people for whichever projects they are interested in pursuing, allowing for people to be replaced.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Same as previous answer.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

For developers, 18f has some basic bootstrapping documentation on their docs page. For their consulting work within government, the have a repository called guides that details many of their practices (accessability, testing, open-source policies, etc).

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

18f holds several documentation repos (or similar) on github. See above, since much of their on-boarding and guides can be considered documentation.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

The 18f github repositories have fairly active issue trackers. You may also send email to 18f@gsa.gov

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

It is a very flat structure, seemingly barely contained chaos (a departure from typical government structure). Any member may develop or launch any project of their choosing, and only need consent when forming a "Guild" within 18f. This loose structure of self-organisation was designed to enable flexibility and speed. More details can be found in their Grouplet Playbook

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Yes, having the ability to work on projects of my choosing would allow me to quickly find (or start) projects that I care about.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

The Government

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Create optimal, transparent, and functional software to digitally lead the United States into a better tomorrow.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Firstly, the U.S. Government. The technology is created to be used by them on whatever level can apply their data into the systems. 18f works with the different branches and groups within the government to create profitable solutions directly for them.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Government Associations, groups, organizations, and subsidiaries. 18f was created shortly after the fiasco of Healthcare.gov to prevent new software from encountering such issues. Now, they are the ones creating the new technologies and helping others to learn how to use and improve their software, which by default is all open source in the U.S. Public Domain.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

No controversies yet; by default they release software in the public domain, with some exceptions. If they work on code that isn’t open source, or is protected by the International Traffic in Arms Regulation, for example, then it would qualify as an exception. The finer details of their policy can be found in their open-source-policy.

Who are some of the users of this service? The government is the biggest user of 18f, having created it to bring about digital solutions to their problems to usher us toward a future aligned with their goals.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Unclear, however it is assumed that 18f receives funding from the General Services Administration.

How does this organization make revenue?

See above

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

N/A

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

N/A

Profile: The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)

Authors

• Michael Tubinis (mtubinis)
• Brian Escriche (Pharas)

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

We simply never heard of OWASP, so why not find out more about it?

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes it is.

What type?

A 501(c)(3) “Worldwide non-for-profit charitable organization”.

When was it founded?

It was founded on April 21, 2004.

By whom?

Founded by Mark Curphey.

Original founder(s) still active?

The original founder is still active.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

It is not publicly traded.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

The company has made 0 acquisitions.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

The company has made 0 investments.

Number of Employees?

The company has 7 Global Board Members and 8 Employees / Contractors.

Where is HQ?

OWASP Foundation (US)
 1200-C Agora Drive, #232
 Bel Air, MD 21014
 US
 +1 951-692-7703 (tel)
 +1 443-283-4021(fax)

Does it have any other offices or locations?

OWASP Europe VZW (EU)
 Leinstraat 104A
 B-9660 Opbrakel
 Belgium
 +1 951-692-7703 (tel)

Website?

OWASP.org

Wikipedia?

Wikipedia: OWASP

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

The Fiscal Year 2013 Annual Report for OWASP

Communications

Social media for OWASP

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Facebook - 8,900 likes.
• Twitter - 41,600 followers.
• Google+ - 2293 members.
• LinkedIn

Communications channels for OWASP

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

• OWASP has a Blog that contains up to date posts about generic OWASP/Internet security news and development progress on the various OWASP projects.

OWASP Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

• OWASP does participate in their own AppSec conferences, both in the EU and in the US.
  • OWASP AppSecEU (2015)
  • OWASP AppSecUSA (2015)

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

OWASP does not have a source code repository itself as it is a coalition of projects. For this section we decided to write about one of their flagship projects in review called "Dependency Check"

The project's IRC Channel

The project does not have an IRC channel.

Source Code repository

Source Code repository

Mail list archive

Mailing list

Documentation

Documentation

Other communication channels

Issue Tracker

Project Website and/or Blog

Website

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

Dependency-check is an open source solution the OWASP Top 10 2013 entry: A9 - Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Dependency-check can currently be used to scan Java applications (and their dependent libraries) to identify known vulnerable components.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

Initial commit was on September 6th, 2012. Latest commit was on May 6th, 2015.

Who approves patches? How many people?

Jeremy Long is the only one who can approve patches.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

There have been 12 contributors to the project overall. Anyone seems to be able to submit pull requests, but only Jeremy Long can approve them.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

There has been no change in the core team since there really is no core team, just the BDFL, who has stayed active for the entire duration of the project's history.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

Jeremy Long is the BDFL.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Since Jeremy Long is the main developer by an overwhelming majority, the front and back end developers are the same people (or rather the same person, the BDFL).

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

There have been no major bugs or problems within the project code wise, and there is no clear indication as to who is in charge of problems. We assume it is the BDFL.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

The project's participation trending is fairly consistent with Jeremy Long committing most of the code.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

The project would not survive the Raptor test since only one person has really contributed to the project.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

The project would not survive the Git by a bus test since only one person has really contributed to the project.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

There is no clear indication of an on-boarding process.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

For documentation, http://jeremylong.github.io/DependencyCheck/ has a large amount of information about the project, but nothing as far as code.

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

Contributing to the project will most likely need to be started by contacting the BDFL Jeremy Long on the mailing list via Subscribe or Post

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

It is no doubt ruled by a single individual, the BDFL Jeremy Long

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Since there is no real structure to the project's community, I would personally not enjoy working on this project.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

This section is not applicable as OWASP does not distribute a sole product or technology, but rather organizes several individuals, companies, and groups that produce various technologies and products (non-commercialized) that relate to internet security.

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

N/A

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

N/A

Who would benefit from using this technology?

N/A

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

N/A

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

N/A

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

There is no specific answer. We assume it was originally funded simply out of pocket and through donations.

How does this organization make revenue?

Through Donations

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Voluntary Donations

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

None that we can find.

Profile: Tor

Authors

• Wyatt Winters
• Caleb Coffie
• Joseph Trotta
• Chris Knepper
• Katie Tigue
• Derin Yarsuvat

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

Tor is a project that has significant impact on the world today. With users being uncertain of the privacy of their online activities, Tor is a tool that we think will be looked to increasingly for protection.

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Yes.

What type?

The Tor Project, Inc is a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education non-profit organization.

When was it founded?

December, 2006.

By whom?

Rober Dingledine and Nick Mathewson.

Original founder(s) still active?

Yes.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

The organization is not publicly traded.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

No acquisitions.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No investments.

Number of Employees?

The Tor website lists 64 individuals as "core people". It is unclear which of these are employees or volunteers.

Where is HQ?

The Tor Project, Inc
7 Temple Street, Suite A
Cambridge, MA 02139-2403 USA

Does it have any other offices or locations?

No.

Website?

The Tor Project, Inc.

Wikipedia?

There are two articles, one for the software and one for the organization.

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Financial reports are available here.

Communications

Social media for Tor

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• Twitter: @torproject

Communications channels for Tor

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

Tor has four channels on OFTC -- the following descriptions are taken directly from the Tor Project website:

• #tor - User and relay operation discussions. Having trouble running Tor or a question for other Tor users? Then this is the spot for you.
• #tor-dev - Channel for people who want to do development. Discussions about Tor-related coding, protocols, and project ideas are all welcome.
• #tor-project - Organization discussions unrelated to software development. A great place to discuss Tor community events, outreach, translation, or website improvements.
• #nottor - This is where Tor people hang out to talk about stuff that is not related to Tor.

Tor also has three mailing lists:

• tor-talk@lists.torproject.org is for discussion on the theory, development, and use of onion routing.
• tor-dev@lists.torproject.org is for Tor research and development.
• bad-relays@lists.torproject.org is for reporting relays that are either improperly configured or malicious.

Tor Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or articipate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

They very infrequently participate in a conference or two. You can stay up to date here.

Community Architecture

Your subject likely runs or contributes to one or more Open Source products or projects. Choose one (or more) of these and answer the following questions (provide links is applicable).

The project's IRC Channel

See Communication channels for Tor.

Source Code repository

https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git

Mail list archive

https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo

Documentation

https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation.html.en

Other communication channels

https://www.torproject.org/about/contact.html.en

Project Website and/or Blog

https://www.torproject.org

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals.

The Tor network is a group of volunteer-operated servers that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the Internet.

Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

The initial commit was on September 20th, 2002. The latest commit (as of 17:36 EST on May 14, 2015) was at 11:09 EST on May 14, 2015, approximately six hours prior to this check.

Who approves patches? How many people?

The project lead will approve patches for each project.

Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

135 people have contributed and ~15 have commit access.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

The core team has, to this date, never changed.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

The BDFL is Nick Mathewson.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Based on a quick look through the core people page, it appears that different people work on different parts of the project. It is difficult, however, to get a sense of what the proportions are, as a lot of developers work on several different projects within Tor.

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

Presumably, the project leads are responsible for quality control and bug repair within their individual projects. A list of major problems that Tor has dealt with is available on the Wikipedia page.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Participation has been consistently trending upwards, probably because of the increased concern in security due to recent events in the US.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

No: 50.3% of commits to the repo are by a single developer -- if that developer left, the project may continue through community support, but there will definitely be significant shocks.

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Similarly to the Raptor Test, the project has the potential to be continued by those with a community interest, but 80.3% of commits were made by the top two contributers.

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

Helpful utilities for new developers can be found in this repo.

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation.html.en

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

We would visit the team on IRC or get help through the mailing lists.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Based on the commit data and core people page, we would conclude that it is a combination of heirarchical and ruled by a pair of individuals.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

Speaking for myself, I would be alright working in this sort of community, as there would be someone above me to consult with on issues, and someone to catch any fatal mistakes I happen to make.

Technology/Product

Section adapted from EFF Worksheet

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

Dr. Paul Syverson was the inventor of onion routing, while Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson were the original three developers of Tor. Contributors in the United States government contribute approximately 80% of Tor's funding.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

Tor is designed to make it difficult to trace Internet activity back to the user by routing packets through several relays that have only limited knowledge of where the packet came from and where the packet is headed.

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Anyone who desires to keep their Internet usage private would benefit from Tor.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

Any governmental institution that might want to have access to or control the Internet usage of their constituents would likely be concerned. Interestingly, those same actors might also be interested in the project -- the reason that the United States Department of Defense funds the project, for example, is because they want access to an 'anonymization' service that is not only used by governmental agencies, but also by regular citizens.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

While users could in theory use Tor or similar services to anonymize their traffic while engaging in copyright infringement, most controversies have been related to drugs and other illict activity.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

The project was originally created by DARPA -- when the code was open-sourced in 2004, the EFF funded some of the original developers to continue development.

How does this organization make revenue?

This organization makes revenue primarily through research grant-like agreements with governmental organizations in the US, as well as donations from other organizations and individuals.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

This organization does not fit all that cleanly into the revenue models discussed -- it is essentially contracted to work on the open source project by a government.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

The organization has made no investments or acquisitions, to our knowledge.

Profile: Ushahidi

Authors

• Kocsen Chung kocsen/kocsenc@gmail.com
• Andrew Schott snapschott/afs7827@rit.edu
• Will Paul dropofwill/whp3652@rit.edu

Rationale

There are so many subjects you could choose to profile, so why did you choose this one? What drew you into wanting to know more about the organization? How did you/your group decide on and agree?

Sounded interesting, Ushahidi had a Github repo, and there seemed to be a lot of information available. Also, they sprung up out of the Kenyan 2007/8 election crisis, which Will had some background knowledge about (extended family lived there at the time).

Organizational Details

Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?

Ushahidi is non-profit software organization.

What type?

They are a Florida based 501(c)(3)

When was it founded?

2008

By whom?

Founded by Erik Hersman, Ory Okolloh, Juliana Rotich, and David Kobia

Original founder(s) still active?

Julliana is Executive Director, David is Tech lead, and Erik is on the board. Ory is no longer directly involved.

Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?

Not publicly traded.

Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?

No acquisitions.

Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.

No investments in other companies.

Number of Employees?

Currently 29 employees and 50 volunteers.

Where is HQ? Does it have any other offices or locations?

They are a virtual company first and foremost. A lot of people work from Kenya (esp. Nairobi) and a few other African countries, but there is also a global presence.

Website?

Ushahidi.com

Wikipedia?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushahidi

Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)

Guidestar has a report from 2013 and that was the latest we could find. It showed $3,271,235 in revenue and $2,016,173 in expenses.

Communications

Social media for Ushahidi

Does your subject participate in social media? If yes, please list a URL for each account, and reach within that community.

• • Twitter: @Ushahidi - 55.7K Followers.*
• • Facebook: /ushahidi - 11K Followers.*
• • Blog: ushahidi.com/blog/*

Communications channels for Ushahidi

What communication channels does your subject use to reach their public? Briefly describe and include a URL for each.

• IRC: freenode #ushahidi
• WIki: wiki.ushahidi.com/
• User Forums: forums.ushahidi.com/

Ushahidi Conference Participation

Does your subject organize or participate in any conferences? If so, list them here, and provide links to any relevant sessions, keynotes, or content.

They do not host full scale conferences, but have done a number of meetups (organized through their meetup.com page), with 68 meetups to date, averaging less than 50 attendees each.

Community Architecture

The project's IRC Channel

IRC: freenode #ushahidi

Source Code repository

Github organization that hosts a number of projects:

github.com/ushahidi

Mail list archive

N/A, they have the above mentioned forum instead.

Documentation

Both the wiki and blog are informative and up to date

Other communication channels

Answered above.

Project Website and/or Blog

Hosted under the main Ushahidi site

• Main product: Ushahidi

• Crowdmap

• CrisisNet

• Ping

• SMSsync

• BRCK

Describe the software project, its purpose and goals. Give brief history of the project. When was the Initial Commit? The latest commit?

The Ushahidi group was formed originally to gather crisis information from the public to show what actually is happening in real time. It basically leverages the power of information carriage in places where information can be oppressed.

In order to do this they provide many products like a map maker and a gather of local posts. A great example is Syria NET which gathers real time information from (sadly) violence and how its spreading across the Syrian land.

Ushahidi has grown to be more than just focus on crisis data sources and has abstracted its way of manipulating data and extending it to other use cases.

It is 100% open since it seems the organization focuses on opening the gateways of data for individuals to form accurate and transparent representations of the events that are happening.

Who approves patches? How many people? Who has commit access, or has had patches accepted? How many total?

The 20 people in charge of commit access for Ushahidi are here: github.com/orgs/ushahidi/people

14 people have had patches accepted, some within and outside of the organization.

Has there been any turnover in the Core Team? (i.e. has the top 20% of contributors stayed the same over time? If not, how has it changed?)

Stayed primarily the same across projects.

Does the project have a BDFL, or Lead Developer? (BDFL == Benevolent Dictator for Life)

David is pretty influential, but the work load is fairly spread throughout the organization.

Are the front and back end developers the same people? What is the proportion of each?

Not applicable to every project, but when it is they tend to be the same people for major contributors (obviously smaller contributors tend to stick with one side of platform).

What have been some of the major bugs/problems/issues that have arisen during development? Who is responsible for quality control and bug repair?

There are currently 200 open issues and 999 closed issues in ushahidi’s main project(https://github.com/ushahidi/Ushahidi_Web/issues) indicating that while, there bugs present in the code, the developers are actively working to maintain their projects.

How is the project's participation trending and why?

Downward on some projects (e.g the main platform), up on others (e.g. BRCK), it seems they focus resources on different projects as time goes on.

In your opinion, does the project pass "The Raptor Test?" (i.e. Would the project survive if the BDFL, or most active contributor were eaten by a Velociraptor?) Why or why not?

There are a decent number of developers with pretty large consistent commits, so it’s pretty safe to say this would survive the raptor test

In your opinion, would the project survive if the core team, or most active 20% of contributors, were hit by a bus? Why or why not?

Probably would take a big hit from the bus test. Aside from the main contributors, commits are very small and inconsistent, but the project is important and serves a good cause, so the project would most likely survive

Does the project have an official "on-boarding" process in place? (new contributor guides, quickstarts, communication leads who focus specifically on newbies, etc...)

Anyone can help out, they have an onboarding guide found here

Does the project have Documentation available? Is it extensive? Does it include code examples?

The Wiki and Forum are quite active and helpful for contributors and users (who may not be tech savvy, e.g. reporters).

If you were going to contribute to this project, but ran into trouble or hit blockers, who would you contact, and how?

Reach out on IRC or the forums probably.

Based on these answers, how would you describe the decision making structure/process of this group? Is it hierarchical, consensus building, ruled by a small group, barely contained chaos, or ruled by a single or pair of individuals?

Looks like no formal process, just make a PR and talk about until someone inside decides its good or not.

Is this the kind of structure you would enjoy working in? Why, or why not?

It looks like it works for this type of organization, but a more formal structure might be beneficial.

Technology/Product

Who invented, created, or sponsored the technology?

The Ushahidi organization.

What is the technology designed to do? How is it used?

It aims to provide information collection, visualisation, and interactive mapping in software to help deal with crises

Who would benefit from using this technology?

Anyone interested in open data, so developers, activists, reporters, just about anyone really.

What kinds of companies or organizations (stakeholders) might have been concerned about the development of this technology? Why?

There user base obviously, which includes some pretty big news organizations, like the BBC for example.

Does/Did an aspect of copyright law play a role in controversies about the technology? How?

None that we uncovered.

Business and Revenue Model

How was this organization funded originally?

Seems to have been the founders side project and then they bootstrapped into a company.

How does this organization make revenue?

They do custom work for organizations that do not want to the development themselves.

Which specific Open Source Revenue Models are utilized?

Similar to a support model, but they also do custom work.

What investments/acquisitions has the organization made?

N/A