Project Qualification Guidance

[martinwoodward]

At the moment, the definition of which projects should consider applying to join the .NET Foundation is a little bit hazy and it's a question I often get asked about. I was thinking of creating a PR to spell this out more but before I did, just wanted to check people are ok with that?

As we've been building the .NET Foundation, the following rough guidelines have emerged based on the feedback from the Advisory Council, the Board of Directors and more recently also the Technical Steering Group on new project applications that have been put forward:

• The project must be licensed under a permissive, OSI recognised open source license (e.g. MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD etc)
• The project should define a process for accepting contributions and also provide information about how contributors become maintainers to support a sustainable level of ongoing contribution and activity
• The project community must be willing to adhere to the .NET Foundation Code of Conduct
• The project should be willing for contributors to sign the .NET Foundation Contribution License Agreement using the automated tooling that we help them set up
• The project should be of general use to the .NET community. The Advisory Council and Technical Steering Group help the Board of Directors in determining this.

Any additional thoughts before I turn into a PR?

[robertmuehsig]

What about the "impact" or "community acceptance" or is this not important at all and even the most smallest project can be part of the .NET Foundation?

[DaveNoderer59]

Presumably there is always a subjective judgement as pointed out in the last point "The project should be of general use to the .NET community. The Advisory Council and Technical Steering Group help the Board of Directors in determining this.". I don't think adding additional terms which are vague and subjective themselves would be helpful.

[martinwoodward]

The main issue with impact or community acceptance is that it hinders incubation of new projects (as they are starting from a point of zero). The way some other foundations get around this is to have a formal incubation process which new projects would have to graduate through - however so far we've been keeping the .NET Foundation a more lightweight foundation.

It also depends on how the advisory council, technical steering group and the board of directors decide to interpret 'general use to the .NET community' which may evolve over time just as the guidelines for acceptance have evolved on a case by case basis so far. Ultimately that last point is a judgement call.

I would like to see more transparency in the process for joining the foundation and getting accepted - but baby steps...

[robertmuehsig]

Makes sense 👍