White paper on types of open source projects

Status: 🗺️ Planned

Abstract

The open source ecosystem is a rich ecosystem composed of very different types of projects and of communities, organizations, and maintainers supporting them. This diversity of project and community types isn’t well documented and is rarely considered by policymakers. As a result, the whole open source ecosystem is often lumped together as a whole, or separated into arbitrary groups that don’t match reality. The purpose of this white paper is threefold:

1. Identify important traits of open source projects that help differentiate and categorize projects into meaningful groups.
2. Define a set of categories based on those traits.
3. Provide examples of open source projects for each category and demonstrate where they fit and why.