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Indeed, there are four levels of open:

- Open source - under an OSI license
- Open community - may accept contributions
- Open governance - adds contributors to become maintainers
- Open brand - trademark is owned by a nonprofit foundation

@mattdm

@shanecurcuru

I'm not really fond of that list.

Particularly:

* I don't think these are "levels", but rather some (but not all) aspects of openness.

* I don't see how "may accept contributions" relates to "open community" — I mean, they seem unrelated, not just a framing I would put differently

@shanecurcuru

Also: "adds contributors to become maintainers" doesn't make sense to me. Can you explain what that means and how it relates to governance?

And: a nonprofit foundation could own a brand and use and license it in a non-open way (and indeed, this is common — see Mozilla and LibreOffice). Conversely, a for-profit corporation or government entity could own a brand but have some form of open licensing or governance.

@mattdm Who gets to be a maintainer has everything to do with governance. From the C4 governance specification:

rfc.zeromq.org/spec/42/

> A “Contributor” is a person who wishes to provide a patch, being a set of commits that solve some clearly identified problem.
> A “Maintainer” is a person who merges patches to the project. Maintainers are not developers; their job is to enforce process.

[ . . . ]

> A new Contributor who makes correct patches, who clearly understands the project goals, and the process SHOULD be invited to become a Maintainer.

@shanecurcuru

@clacke @shanecurcuru

Thanks — it makes sense using those definitions. (It isn't the definitions we use in Fedora.)

@mattdm @shanecurcuru Oh right. Yes.

Maintainer in an upstream project and package maintainer in a distro are two very different roles.

@clacke @shanecurcuru

And I don't think all upstream projects use that exact definition consistently.