Many important and self-organized FOSS projects are not legal entities; however some have annual budgets managed by fiscal hosts. We aim to host metadata for these entities to enable comparisons across the FOSS ecosystem.
Entity Modeling
“Foundations” here are defined as legal non-profit entities: either a 501C3/C6 in the US, or a registered charity in various other countries. That enables tracking and comparisons of governance, finances, and other organizational factors that are legally required. Non-foundation entities may also have governance and a budget, but have different kinds of constraints than legal entities. Work in progress.
- identifier: similar to foundations, name of the file, for easy lookups to sponsorship models
- commonName, description, and other common metadata about a project
- various practical policy links that apply to the project (trademarks, code of conduct, etc.)
- fiscalHost: what other entity handles finances for the project
- parentOrganization: if the entity specifically ties governance to a parent foundation - much like Linux Foundation projects inherit various internal controls. c6 organizations likely have fiscalHost = parentOrganization. c3 organizations may not: for example, SPI and Open Source Collective acts as fiscal hosts, but don’t really restrict governance of the project itself.
Roadmap / Contributions Wanted
Modeling entities is important to track key parts of the FOSS ecosystem that aren’t legal corporations. This includes the CNCF as well as Debian.
- Building minimal required model.
- Gather and validate any entities we want to compare (see list of sponsorships to start).
- Ensure tooling can properly compare/categorize any finance reports we build across legal entities vs. project entities.