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Sustainer Manifesto

Introduction

Whether people are aware of it or not, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is becoming an increasingly important part of our everyday lives.

Sustainers are concerned with the fragile state and future of highly-used and impactful open source projects. We passionately advocate and evangelize for the needs of open source maintainers.

Sustainers use a community-based approach to create safe-spaces in order to talk openly about sustainability issues and most importantly, how to solve them. We want to create communities of sustainers making the open source experience better for the users, contributors, and maintainers.

We have come up with a set of principles that we believe are critical for everyone inside and outside of the open source community to continue to benefit the world.

Principles

  1. FOSS is everywhere Sustainers acknowledge that open source software is an integral part of modern life—a key component in society as a whole.

    Rationale: FOSS are reusable building blocks that power commercial and non-commercial software offerings that operate our digital infrastructure.

  2. Licensing Sustainers believe that open source refers to software that uses a license approved by The Open Source Initiative (OSI) or The Free Software Foundation (FSF).

    Rationale: The OSI and FSF are organizations created with wide ranging support from open source leaders to be stewards of the open source definition and a forum for advancing the goals of the FOSS movement.

  3. Maintainers Sustainers work to support maintainers to avoid burnout and build in redundancy.

    Rationale: FOSS maintainers accepted a responsibility to coordinate development work. We need to support these people to ensure that FOSS continues to be maintained and has responsible leadership.

  4. Communities Sustainers help cultivate welcoming and inclusive communities for open source projects.

    Rationale: FOSS is a community effort.

  5. Governance Sustainers design inclusive and transparent governance for open source project communities.

    Rationale: Fair and equitable governance rules lower barriers to participate and ensure a shared understanding of how projects operate. Documented roles and responsibilities reduce friction within communities and fuels collaboration.

  6. Funding Sustainers establish long-term funding for open source projects by developing revenue sources, securing sponsorships, and working with corporate and business partners.

    Rationale: FOSS development requires resources and providing these resources should not fall back to volunteers who already donate their time.

  7. Security Sustainers promote best practices for developing and testing secure FOSS that protects the privacy and well-being of its users.

    Rationale: FOSS is the digital infrastructure and society cannot afford to be vulnerable.

  8. Compliance Sustainers respect the legal requirements of open source licenses and will work to comply.

    Rationale: Compliance is about respecting people and licenses are make explicit how people want their intellectual property to be treated.

  9. Publicity Sustainers raise public awareness of the widespread use of FOSS, its underlying ideals, and why it requires public support to be sustainable.

    Rationale: FOSS is more than software; it redefines the relationship between developers and users by giving more freedom to both. This is a cultural shift that requires widespread public support.

  10. Diversity Sustainers push open source to its best by working to create diverse and inclusive communities with regard to race, gender, sexuality, region, social class, age, (dis-)ability, tenure, first language, caregiver, skill sets (i.e. non-code contributors), and other underrepresented identities.

    Rationale: FOSS is created to benefit everyone and thus requires input and feedback from everyone. Discriminating against any group of people would mean that their needs are not represented within the design of FOSS and that we stifle the potential for greater innovation and broader community support.

Advancing the Sustainers Manifesto

The Sustainers Manifesto was written and is maintained by participants in the yearly Sustain Summit. The Manifesto is open to critique and change requests. To discuss give feedback, discuss the manifesto's meaning, or propose changes, please open a thread on the Sustain Forum. For specific changes, please issue a pull request at (where ever we move this).

Sustainers Pledge

Sustainers pledge to support this Manifesto in its activities. Specifically, we will:

  1. Build and enable open-source solutions and communities that support the Manifesto's principles.

  2. Organize recurring events (i.e., Sustain Summit) and give talks at events for sustainers to exchange best practices, to advance the Sustainer Principles, and to share success stories.

  3. Maintain a discussion platform (i.e., https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) for maintainers to compile best practices, ask for help, learn from each other, share success stories, tell cautionary tales, and build a community of practice to further the Sustainer Principles.

  4. Establish and promote the 'sustainer' definition to spread awareness, create a shared identity for sustainers, and empower sustainers.

Invitation

We invite all who support the principles of the Sustainers Manifesto to join with us, and to find new ways to make this vision of the open source sustainability a reality. Specifically, participate in our annual event, discuss on our forum, tag your tweets with #sustainoss, and advocate in your own communities.

Credits

This work was adapted from The Mozilla Manifesto using the CC BY-SA 3.0 license

Authors of this manifesto:

  • Justin Dorfman (@jdorfman)
  • Georg Link (@georglink)

Contributors:

  • Jaskirat Singh
  • Michael Downey

Last modified, December 19, 2018