Open Source Software Foundations
Material derived from an article by Zhensheng Xie, http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/738/704
Definition
Zhensheng Xie:
"Communities that develop open source software (OSS) are virtual entities on the Internet, not legal entities. Some open source communities establish open source software foundations (OSSF) in order to protect their intellectual property and carry out contractual arrangements. As legal entities, OSSF help communities attain their long-term goals, hold community assets, provide resources to communities, and balance interests amongst different stakeholders." (http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/738/704)
Description
Zhensheng Xie:
"Typically when an open source community incorporates as an OSSF, they seek to gain financial advantages from donations and tax exemptions. OSSF is a non-profit organization (NPO) with a primary objective to support or to actively engage in activities of public or private interest without any commercial or monetary profit purposes. A NPO is a corporation that can handle business dealings, sign contracts, and own property as any other individual or for-profit corporation. NPOs differ from for-profits in terms of taxes and governance. A NPO's governance structures preclude private financial gain. OSSF in the US are registered under tax-exempt 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6). 501(c)(6) is reserved for "Business Leagues and groups such as Chambers of Commerce" and is a form of a business network in favour of pursuing members' own business interests whereas 501(c)(3) organizations provide public benefits. Most OSSF registered in the US are 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations. In the US, both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) NPOs are exempt from most federal income taxes. OSSFs registered outside of the US usually have similar benefits. From a legal perspective, an OSSF is a legacy NPO.
An OSSF must have at least one software project in which individuals are contributing to a new software release. The Apache Software Foundation is an OSSF while the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is not as it focuses on standards and does not hold any software projects." (http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/738/704)
Examples
"Six OSSF registered in the US were selected for our research:
1. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) was incorporated in Delaware in 1999 to support the Apache HTTP server project. As of 2008, the ASF hosts 65 OSS projects, with 1765 committers. The ASF has a meritocracy based membership structure supporting a large and mature open source community. Its organizational processes serve as examples for other OSSF and it has earned a reputation for incubating OSS projects.
2. IBM released Eclipse code as open source and formed the Eclipse consortium in 2001. In 2004, the Eclipse consortium was reorganized into the Eclipse Foundation, a 501(c)(6) non-profit. In 2008, the Eclipse Foundation hosted 11 top-level projects with 21 strategic members, 179 organizational members, and 942 committers. Eclipse is dominant in the market for Java Integrated Development Environments (IDE). Unlike most other OSSF, the Eclipse Foundation supports its members' business interests with a large and established community sponsored and controlled by companies. It is a known example of the commercial open source phenomenon known as OSS 2.0.
3. The GNOME Foundation was founded in 1997 to support the GNOME project and related projects which provide a desktop environment and development platform. The GNOME desktop environment is one of the dominant desktop environments for Linux and the GNOME Foundation has a large and established community.
4. The Plone Foundation was founded in 2004 to support the development of Plone, an open source content management system (CMS). Plone has a rather small share of the CMS market, but it is deemed as one of the best in the market. The Plone Foundation has a meritocracy based membership structure with many small open source consultants and service vendors within the Plone community.
5. The Python Software Foundation was founded in 2001 as an organization devoted to the Python programming language, one of the leading script programming languages.
6. Software in the Public Interest (SPI) was formed by members of the Debian project in 1997. Its mission is to "help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software". It hosts several open source projects, such as Debian, freedesktop.org, and openOffice.org. GNOME was a sub-project hosted by SPI before the GNOME Foundation was founded. SPI seldom intervenes in the affairs of its member projects, but it does hold their common assets." (http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/738/704)
See also:
Discussion
Governance
Excerpts from http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/738/704
Zhensheng Xie:
Introduction
"Governance refers to the overall processes and structures used to direct and manage an organization's operations and activities. Three aspects of governance were the focus of our research: i) governance structure; ii) activities of the Board of Directors (BOD); and iii) occupations of the members of the BOD.
Most of the sample OSSF are membership based NPOs with the elected BOD bearing the major responsibilities for the organization. Members of the OSSF can be either a merit member or a sponsor member. An individual becomes a merit member after being recognized as making non-trivial contributions to the foundation. A sponsor member is a company that donates resources, such as money and developers, and in return is admitted as a member of the foundation. Typically, individuals are merit members, organizations are sponsor members, and employees of organizations represent sponsor members."
Governance Structure Typology
Based on "the extent to which the sponsor members can participate in the decision making of OSSF", we found three types of OSSF governance structures:
1. Merit: all members are merit members with full voting rights.
2. Merit dominated: merit members are in a majority and it is difficult for sponsor members as a group to affect outcomes.
3. Sponsor dominated: sponsor members are in a majority and may be classified into tiers where the size of the payment determines tier membership. Merit members typically work for a company or research centre.
The ASF, SPI, and the Plone Foundation are merit type foundations. The GNOME Foundation and the Python Software Foundation are Merit dominated. The Eclipse Foundation is sponsor dominated.
OSSF governance is comprised of five dimensions. The first dimension focuses on how much effort the BOD spends on strategic planning and common vision development. The second and third dimensions relate to the composition of the BOD: i) members who have a reputation in the OSS community and ii) members with a background in engineering and science. The fourth dimension deals with power, specifically the power the BOD has over timing and content of the roadmap and software releases and the power of sponsor members. Finally, the fifth dimension focuses on sponsor members' ability to participate in decision-making. "
Board Activities and Occupations
Twelve categories of governance activities were defined as being carried out by the BODs of OSSF. The twelve activity categories are: i) strategic planning and common vision development; ii) development of policy and guidelines; iii) project governance; iv) financial governance; v) primary resources governance; vi) human resources governance; vii) fund-raising; viii) external relation management; ix) BOD self development; x) governance structure management; xi) community development; and xii) conference governance.
All six BODs in the sample allocated more than 60% of their efforts carrying out activities that fall into the following four categories: i) project governance; ii) development of policy and guidelines; iii) external relations; and iv) governance structure management. All six BODs allocated the least amount of effort to carrying out the following three activity categories: i) strategic planning and common vision development; ii) human resources governance; and iii) BOD self development. Effort was calculated by counting BOD activities per month in that category within the research period. Percentage of activities is the ratio of activities per month in that category to total number of activities per month. That the BODs in the sample did not spend more effort raising funds was a surprise. The BOD of one foundation did not undertake any activities to raise funds; only 3% of another's activities were carried out to raise funds. One reason may be that the virtual nature of OSSF does not require large operational budgets.
Among the six OSSF in the sample, the GNOME BOD is the most active as it carries out more activities per month than the other OSSF, while the BOD for SPI is the least active.
We believe that the occupation and status of BOD members affects the BOD's ability to carry out tasks as well as its behaviour. Eclipse and Plone have a greater proportion of BOD members with a background in management, business development, and strategic management, while the proportion of engineers and scientists is small. More than 50% of the BOD of the Plone and Eclipse Foundations are part of their companies' top management teams.
SPI has the largest proportion of BOD members with an engineering or scientific background (67%) and a small proportion of BOD members with a background in management, business development, and strategic management (11%). SPI and ASF have the largest proportion of OSS developers in their BOD, while Plone and Eclipse have none on their BOD.
Company Involvement in Governance
"Company involvement refers to when the company invests resources in an OSSF and influences the mission, primary organizational activities, and relationships of the OSSF. A company may directly influence the decision-making processes of an OSSF by having its employees hold seats in the BOD and other governance groups of the OSSF. A company may also indirectly influence decisions made by the members of an OSSF by providing resources to affect a decision. All six OSSF in the sample receive monetary donations or membership fees from companies. All six BOD in the sample have employees from companies that have business interests in an OSSF's projects." (http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/738/704)