Create an open source program

Did you know that many organizations including industry innovators like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, have established open source programs? Immersing your company in open source culture is a competitive advantage that will allow you to hire the best talent, decrease risk, and innovate by increasing your shipping speed.

An open source program empowers anyone within your organization to determine when code should be made public and helps them safely navigate the process of doing so. This course will guide you as you create that open source program. You'll establish guidance and governance for your open source program, examine what current innovators are doing, and leverage existing templates and resources. This hands-on lab will help you tackle some big questions and give you a clear path forward for becoming an open source enterprise.

What you'll learn

In this course, we'll answer common questions like:

• How do I create an open source program at my organization?
• Why is an open source program beneficial?
• How do I create discoverable repositories?
• What's a code of conduct?
• How do I create a communication plan for my open source program?
• What is a maintainer guide and how do I create one?
• How should we license our projects?
• What licenses should we consume?
• What should be in a template README for my organization's repositories?

After taking this course, you'll be able to:

• Assess your organization's existing open source efforts
• Establish the goals of an open source program
• Create a repository for your open source program, complete with contributing and communication guidelines, codes of conduct, templates, and maintainer guides
• Abide by existing open source licenses
• Choose a license for releasing an open source project

What you'll build

• Completed source repository showing the templates added throughout the course.

Prerequisites

We recommend you first complete the following courses:

• InnerSource fundamentals to learn how InnerSource and open source are different but related concepts. A strong InnerSource culture could be the perfect precursor to a successful open source program.
• Reviewing pull requests to learn how to work in GitHub pull requests, which are used throughout this course.

Projects used

This course uses all original content, we didn't use any open source projects to create it.

Audience

Developers, Managers, Teams