Our commitment to open technology #

This page describes 2i2c’s commitment to developing and contributing to infrastructure that is open source now and into the future. More context can be found in this blog post.

Definitions of MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, MAY, etc are defined in RFC 2119

  1. All engineering artifacts (code, documentation, etc) produced by 2i2c’s engineering team MUST be licensed under an open source license approved by a non-profit organization that is not 2i2c.1
  2. Open Source Projects originating at 2i2c, or stewarded by 2i2c, MUST NOT require a Contributor Licensing Agreement that includes Copyright Assignment to 2i2c. 2
  3. The list of external organizations that define licenses we accept are3:
    1. the Open Source Initiative
    2. the Organization for Ethical Source.
  4. Modifying (1), (2), or (3) MUST be done through a 2/3 majority vote of 2i2c staff. 4

These commitments ensure 2i2c’s ongoing support for open source technology and community-owned infrastructure, and constrain us from changing this commitment in a way that would harm our communities. We hope that this builds trust with our communities to rely on 2i2c as a provider and a steward of their infrastructure. See this blog post for more context

  1. This constrains us from writing proprietary engineering code or creating proprietary products. Note that this only applies to 2i2c artifacts, and not those that are created by our member communities. ↩︎

  2. Protects from the most common “bait and switch” licensing problem, where being the sole copyright owner of a project allows us to change the license in the future because we’ve retained ownership over all the code. ↩︎

  3. This constrains us from creating a new non profit that rubberstamps a license that is fundamentally proprietary, while still allowing for experimentation with licenses that try to innovate on OSI. ↩︎

  4. This sets an intentionally-high bar for modifying this policy. In 2025 we aim to re-establish our steering council along with a community advisory board that is tasked with defining policy like this. In the interrim, we choose 2/3 of the organization to be a reasonably high bar for changing this policy ↩︎