This year brought in-person meetings and social gatherings like summits and conferences to a total standstill. As a result, virtual engagement got its moment in the sun. It paved the way for a strong surge in virtual engagement, which also found its way to online communities.
One of the major, oft-touted benefits of open source software is the diverse, large, and ever ready army of developers contributing to the project. This can be an incredibly powerful argument when demonstrating the value of open source to a corporation. However, the larger the community and the bigger the pool of contributors the more opportunity there exists for problems or potential security risks.
This is a very real concern. When a community grows there are more developers contributing code to the project. As more developers contribute code and their solutions to problems there is a very real need to establish some guidelines for all contributors to follow. Establishing a standard for code submissions, requiring acceptance of a common license, and implementing peer review are three ways in which good open source projects help to mitigate the risk of problematic code.
Open source projects should always have a software license of some kind. This defines the distribution policies and the methods in which others can use the software. An important step to consider when allowing developers to contribute code is the license which should be applied to the proposed code. It is important because developers must be aware and in agreement with the license type chosen by the project. Some open source projects request a signature to acknowledge the license type of any code submitted.
There will always be pain points in open source and no community is perfect. However, the argument that open source communities are somehow less ideal than a closed source corporation is simply untrue. The list above is just a small sample of how each potentially perceived risk of open source can be mitigated and resolved.
We present to you, “Top 10 Community Software Providers – 2022.”
