Mozilla has released the results of a study that was commissioned for internal purposes to better understand the various archetypes of open source projects. The goal of this study was to build a common vocabulary to use when discussing open source development, and to better understand the benefits and drawbacks of various project structures.
These archetypes include:
- Business to Business – designed to spur OEM adoption and drive out competing option.
- Multi-vendor Infrastructure – large software projects that provide value to a wide range of businesses and is designed collaboratively with each vendor having their own deployment method.
- Rocket Ship to Mars – projects with a small, full-time core team that is singularly focused on a specific goal.
- Controlled Ecosystem – a project with community involvement and diverse motivations, but with an individual or organization that acts as a benevolent dictator.
- Wide Open – projects that welcome contributions from any source and all levels.
- Mass Market – similar to wide open, but with a much more controlled contribution process that is dependent on product experience and time-to-market.
- Specialty Library – provide base functionality to a set of functions that require specialized knowledge to build.
- Trusted Vendor – projects where the direction is controlled by a single party, but also includes active encouragement of a commercial ecosystem.
- Upstream Dependency – software that is intended to be a building block for other software.
- Bathwater – code that is simply dumped over the wall.
