good-labs / greater-good-affirmation

An affirmation that your open source community exists for the greater good.

The Greater Good Affirmation (GGA)

This is an effort to encourage transparency in open source software. Projects that take the Greater Good Affirmation affirm that there are no ulterior motives, and that communication and incentives are transparent. By taking the Greater Good Affirmation, a community affirms that it provides software under a traditional open source model, and exists non-selfishly to solve problems toward the greater good.

How do I participate?

We are actively working on the first draft of the affirmation, please make suggestions or comments to the document here. The (live) version on the site is updated regularly after conversation with changes, and when discussion dies down the first (official) release will go out.

Participation comes down to reading the affirmation, and then adding the Greater Good Affirmation badge to your repository. Participation is done on good faith. The presence of the badge in your GitHub projects affirms that you are working for the greater good.

Where do I go next?

• FAQ read some frequently asked questions
• Background provides further detail about the greater good pledge.
• Contribute Is transparent open source important to you? Learn more about how to contribute.

greater-good-affirmation's Issues

paying for security updates

Is software for the greater good if you have to pay for security updates? I mean you can run the "community" version for free but there are known vulnerabilities in it (CVEs) and the way to stay secure is to switch to the version that's commercially supported. Does this have anything to do with the Greater Good Affirmation?

maintainance of README.md vs GREATER_GOOD_PLEDGE.md

As of 562ba07 README.md vs GREATER_GOOD_PLEDGE.md seem to have a lot of duplicate content. Will it be hard to keep them in sync?

Consider ideas from "Free software/utopia" talk by Deb Nicholson from LibrePlanet 2019

Deb Nicholson recently gave a talk at LibrePlanet 2019 called "Free software/utopia" full of ideas worth considering. I've transcribed a bit of her talk, where she says the following.

"My name is Deb Nicholson. Today I'm going to talk about free software and utopia... I work at the Software Freedom Conservancy which is itself a fairly idealistic organization. We are a fiscal home for about 50 free software projects that are all community-driven, bound to the public interest because we are a charitable organization. So we think about how the world could be, all the time...

When I thing about utopia, awake at night... what should the world be like? I hope that we agree on a couple of things, that it involves justice and transparency and empowerment. When I think about the utopia I hope that some of the things that are common to our ideas don't involve a large section of the population being kept in the dark and not in control of anything, and then a couple of other people, maybe four or five large companies like Amazon being in charge of everything and then just pestering us with ads all day... So I hope we have some kind of personal autonomy, some kind of transparency, some sort of control over our lives online might be part of that utopia."

You can watch the whole talk at https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/free-software-utopia/

Some of the key ideas for me:

• community-driven
• bound to the public interest
• justice
• transparency
• empowerment

Suggestion: pivot to "public-domain-affirmation"

I found this site via Tauri. Interesting concept. Have you considered a slight tweak and calling it "public-domain-affirmation"? I look at things like tcp/ip, www, and more recently sqlite, and notice that the things being done for "the greater good", are all just put into the public domain. Perhaps you could kick off a trend where people loudly and proudly declare their support for public domain?

Just throwing this out there. Feel free to close. Thought sometimes a little tweak can make all the difference.

Wording on https://good-labs.github.io/greater-good-pledge/

@vsoch the words that say

is not primarily composed of paid participants

on https://good-labs.github.io/greater-good-pledge/ seem a little different to the wording

The majority of contributors represent dispersed community (and not required participants for a company)

in the pledge README.md . The good-labs.github.io wording reads (to me at least) like it might exclude a lot of things (e.g. the Linux kernel) that might otherwise be candidates for joining the pledge?

Potential story about Code Co-op

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bitd8f/commercial_peertopeer_version_control_system_code/

remove participants.csv

[Request] Add translation to other languages.

I can make Russian translation, but need some project/site structure for it.

Thanks for awesome project!

open core

Does "open core" have anything to do with the Greater Good Affirmation? Is open core for the greater good? If open core is off topic here, perhaps it's on topic over at https://github.com/good-labs/FUNDING.md

Add collection of stories

The stories folder should have real (provided by the developer, publicly) or example user stories for projects that are for the greater good. This will be an important resource if a contributor comes to the repository and wants to understand the kind of projects that would be able / not be able to take the pledge.

Create infrastructure to accept pledges

The interested user should be able to request a review (via submission of an online form) or via pull request to the repository. Given the form, one of the maintainers will open the PR for discussion. Specifically:

• The submitter should add some file with metadata that will be served (@pdurbin thoughts?)
• The entry will be reviewed in the PR if the criteria are met
• Merging will generate the badge for the project/community, along with updating Github pages site for those that have taken the pledge.

So I need to figure out that flow of things.

maintainer or final decision maker

As of 562ba07 the pledge starts with "As a maintainer of an open source project or group" but in my world I'm a maintainer of some software but not one of the final decision makers. Should we change the phrasing?

IEEE Code of Ethics

Today I heard someone talking about the IEEE Code of Ethics. Here's a link: https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

What if instead of a Greater Good Affirmation we had an Open Source Code of Ethics?

This is just a passing thought, just something that crossed my radar. Please feel free to close this issue if it isn't helpful.

rename to greater good affirmation

[definition] consider well defined "public benefit"

We might consider the nicely stated definition of "public benefit" here
https://delcode.delaware.gov/title8/c001/sc15/

Add example cases

An organization / project should be able to read about examples (scenarios) when an org does / doesn't meet the criteria.

is completely open communication realisitic for co-located teams? security?

As of 8d3a317 the pledge says, "The community must have completely open communication, meaning all discussion around development is public." This sound great until you realize that a co-locate team is going to:

• hang around the water cooler and chat
• chat during standup
• have meetings without you, the person on the internet

I'm a big fan of overcommunicating as much as possible to people who aren't in the room but I'm not sure the the current phrasing is realistic.

In addition, security concerns should not be discussed in the open.

Badge should be presented on merge to PR

Done!

Versioning to criteria

The criteria should be versioned, so in case we change the previous versions can be looked up.