Promoting Your Open Source Projects
The Yahoo Open Source Program Office (OSPO) provides services to help engineers at Yahoo prepare code for external publication, promote projects, and build open source communities. If you are interested in open source collaboration, we are here to help. To get an overview of our program, visit the OSPO Welcome Page intranet page, chat with us on our internal Slack channel (#opensource), or send an email to ospo@.
This page highlights the levels of support we provide to the open source projects we publish.
Step Zero: Planning for Success
The OSPO provides a range of support services to help our open source projects be successful. Our support levels vary based on a subjective assessment of the strategic importance and opportunity of the project. We offer 4 tiers of support services: strategic, limited, minimal, and archived. Each support level comes with requirements we expect you to meet. Based on our staffing levels we will limit the number of projects which we can provide Tier 1 support. Thus we remind project teams that the term Tier 1 is not a value judgement of your project’s worth, but a measure of our level of services to support it.
Tier 1: Strategic Support
This level of support is for projects with a strategic to value and robust engineering support. To receive strategic support, a project must:
- Have a strategic value to Yahoo.
- Have an internal employee project owner that serves as point of contact for all issues.
- Be meaningfully active (e.g. at minimum, having an update in the last month).
We expect your project:
- Has all the required repository components as per our repository standard. i.e. a complete README.md file, appropriate Contributing.md, Code-of-Conduct.md, and LICENSE.md files.
- Accepts contributions from external participants and provides details on how to do so.
- Is responsive to resolving security vulnerability alerts.
We will provide your project:
- Recognition on the Yahoo Open Source front page.
- Security alert notices and resolution tracking.
- Notifying the project owners of important conference deadlines relevant to your project.
- Reviewing proposals before you submit them to a conference “Call for Papers” (CFP) to maximize your chance of acceptance.
- Reviewing talk slides to provide advice on structure, flow, and branding.
- Coordination with PR for presentation promotion - before, during, and after the conference.
- Meetup events support.
- Periodic meetings to review community health and growth.
Tier 2: Limited Support
This level of support is for projects that further Yahoo’s technology goals and interests. To receive limited support, a project must:
- Have an internal employee project owner that serves as point of contact for all issues.
- Be at least minimally active (e.g. having a meaningful update in the last three months).
We expect your project:
- Has all the required repository components as per our repository standard. i.e. a complete README.md file, appropriate Contributing.md, Code-of-Conduct.md, and LICENSE.md files.
- Accepts contributions from external participants and provides details on how to do so.
- Is responsive to resolving security vulnerability alerts.
We will provide your project:
- Recognition on the Yahoo Open Source website and related open source engineering pages.
- Security alert notices and resolution tracking.
- Notifying the of important conference deadlines posted internally in our #tech-events slack channel.
Tier 3: Minimal Support
This level of support is for projects that are somewhat useful but no longer actively managed. They are still worth displaying for public consumption and potential contributions. Examples of these projects include proof-of-concept projects, research projects, reference implementations, and anything else that is not likely to receive improvements. Minimal support projects must:
- Have an internal employee project owner that serves as point of contact for all issues.
We expect your project:
- Has basic repository components such as a complete README.md and LICENSE.md files.
- Is responsive to resolving security vulnerability alerts.
We will provide your project:
- Security alert notices and resolution tracking.
Tier 4: Archived Projects
We archive a project.
- When the person or team who maintained the project no longer works here.
- When the project maintainers are not responsive to resolve a security alert.
- When the project is inactive (e.g. no meaningful changes in 2 years).
We will mark these projects as Archived. This allows people to read and fork the code, while it also sends the message that we are not actively supporting the code. Note: if you are the only project maintainer of an active open source project that is employed at Yahoo, but you plan to leave the company, contact the OSPO. You can fork the project and maintain it in a different location, or we can identify an employee to serve as our contact for project updates.