Note: The home page for this report is opentechstrategies.com/archetypes, and there is a PDF available there. This repository is only useful if you want to look at the editing history of the report, or to suggest a change, report a bug, etc.

This report is currently on version 2.

"Open source" is a broad term that encompasses many different types of projects. There is a wide range of open source approaches, and sometimes it helps to think through how your open source approach matches your goals, resources, and environment.

We often see "open source project" used as a catch-all term to describe very different projects that share only the fact that their source code is distributed under an open source license. We don't have a common vocabulary to discuss open source development in ways that take account of important differences between various types of open source project.

This report is a first step in providing that common vocabulary. OTS prepared the first edition for Mozilla in the first half of 2018, and the second edition in November 2019. The report catalogs a number of open source archetypes we have observed through watching many projects over a couple of decades. We have found these archetypes to be a useful resource when crafting strategy, weighing tradeoffs, and committing support to open source endeavors.

We hope it is useful to you as you design open source initiatives, weigh tradeoffs in strategy, and pick metrics to track success. The archetypes we list are useful comparison points for anybody trying to maximize the benefits of their open source investment.

The boundaries between these archetypes are fuzzy. One shouldn't expect a real-world project to fit perfectly into exactly one archetype. The archetypes are not a taxonomy: a project may fit multiple archetypes at once, and we had heated discussions on how to characterize some projects. Many successful projects change archetypes over their lifecycle.

This report is written in LaTeX, and uses the OTS Doctools system to generate the PDF output. Once you have the ots-doctools infrastructure installed properly, running make should just work, if you're on a Unix-like system that has GNU Make. We don't have experience building this document on Windows, but if you do, please let us know how it goes and how we can improve these instructions.

This document was originally authored by Karl Fogel, James Vasile, and Cecilia Donnelly of Open Tech Strategies as a work-for-hire under contract to Mozilla Corporation. It is copyrighted by the Mozilla Foundation and Open Tech Strategies, and licensed to you under CC-BY-SA. To provide attribution, please link to opentechstrategies.com/archetypes.

Mozilla reviewed drafts and provided a great deal of helpful commentary, but exercised no editorial control over content. Open Tech Strategies is solely responsible for the content of the report, including any errors.