The ‘open’ in open source is about more than sharing code. It’s about sharing how your project is funded, how you make decisions, and who’s on your core team.
From operating systems to CSS frameworks, open source gives creators the ability to accelerate development, learn from communities of experts, and incorporate thoroughly-reviewed code. At its heart, open source concerns freedoms relating to code, but an open source project is a complex system that happens to focus on code.
In my last article, we started to explore how we might move past the typical focus on the open source license and instead develop a social model that captures additional complexity.