Mozilla identified 10 archetypes of open source projects:
- Business-to-Business (B2B) Open Source (e.g. Android, Chromium)
- Multi-Vendor Infrastructure (e.g. Kubernetes, Open Stack)
- Rocket Ship To Mars (e.g. Meteor, Signal)
- Controlled Ecosystem (e.g. WordPress, Drupal)
- Wide Open (e.g. Rust, Apache HTTPD)
- Mass Market (e.g. Firefox, LibreOffice, MediaWiki)
- Specialty Library (e.g. libssl, libmp4)
- Trusted Vendor (e.g. MongoDB, Hypothes.is, Coral)
- Upstream Dependency (e.g. OpenSSL, WebKit)
- Bathwater: “code dumped over the wall” / “someone publishes code under a free license”
(apparently, they are still looking for examples)
The classification provide a short description and a simple scheme to classify each project given “Licensing”, “Community standards”, “Component coupling”, “Main benefits” and “Typical governance”.
Actually, I’m proud to dump my operating system over the wall.
I hack in good company, after all.
Also, the actually report is at: https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/MZOTS_OS_Archetypes_report_ext_scr.pdf
This link is just to a preface of sorts
This is great. Now I possess new language to describe those “open source in name only” projects that I dislike so much.
Actually, most free software is classified as Bathwater.
I guess this was intentional, as the whole point of open source was to work around the ethical values of the Free Software movement and use source availability as a marketing tool.
Hi again, Shamar!
Does the word ‘actually’ really need to be in your post?
I thought about saying “free software in name only”, but actually the projects in question don’t call themselves free software.
I guess you are reminding me that “open source” isn’t diminished by B2B and Rocket To Mars projects, because the “open source” term itself is already a diminished version of “free software”. I know, I know!
FWIW, I think most free software I actually use falls into the Wide Open category (as Debian packages, there are lists and repos and people, even if the upstream lacks those) while most of the software I fork and build myself are Bathwater projects (otherwise, I’d use the existent packages!).