Open Source

Licensing, governance, maintenance and the supply chain underneath your build.

Updated 8 September 2026

• 3 min read

  Choosing a License for Your Project: A Decision Path, Not a Table

  Open source licensing is about more than making software available. It's a choice about what permission and obligations will travel with the software, and to whom. So it requires…

• 4 min read

  Your Open Source Dependency Has One Maintainer: Assessing the Risk

  Popular open source projects provide crucial building blocks to modern applications. But relying on a dependency with just one maintainer carries significant risk, no matter how much…

• 4 min read

  What Maintainers Actually Want: First Contributions That Get Merged

  A first contribution to an open-source project is most likely to be merged when it is small, single-purpose, and written in the terms of the project, not the contributor’s.

• 5 min read

  Governance in Small Projects: Deciding Before You Have to

  A project starts small and with great enthusiasm. Maybe it is built by one or a few members. GitHub issues, community discussions, and code reviews are how decisions are made. Then at…

• 5 min read

  Software Bills of Materials: What an SBOM Is Good For, and What It Is Not

  An SBOM, or Software Bill of Materials, is a formal, machine-readable record of the components that make up a piece of software and the relationships between them. The question for a…