Contributing to or starting own open source projects (also called outbound open source) can support your open source strategy. If you did only consume open source software so far, outbound open source can be the next step of your open source journey.

This guide contains comprehensive information about how to start contributions to open source projects. It mentions the most important topics that you should take care of and describes different contributions models and procedures, that can be implemented in companies of any size. Finally, you learn how spare-time contributions can be handled.

Starting open source projects is another part of the guide. It describes the typical lifecycle of such projects and explains why starting such projects can make sense for your company. Legal aspects such as IP and licensing are covered, as well as administrative and technical topics such as repository management and recommendable tools. Finally, the guide goes into project promotion, community management and touches on project analytics and open source metrics.

Please note that the initial contributors from this guide come from corporate environments. Due to this limited scope, this guide cannot properly be applied for noncorporate entities. We welcome contributors from non-corporate sectors and other areas to expand the scope of the guide in a future via community contributions.

Please read our contributing guides to learn more.

Please see the table of contents for an overview and links to the detailed sections.

Thanks to all the participants in this study who generously spent time working on this guide and shared their expertise in outbound open source:

• Michael Picht: @misappi
• Cornelius Schumacher: @cornelius
• Oliver Fendt: @oliverfendt
• Ana Jiménez: @anajsana
• Josep Prat: @jlprat
• Justin Abrahms: @justinabrahms

If you would like to contribute and be acknowledged, please read our contributing guides

The content of this repository licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.