[$] Untangling the Open Collectives

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/964402/

Name collisions aren’t just a problem for software
development—organizations, projects, and software that have the
same or similar names can cause serious confusion. That was certainly
the case on February 28 when the Open Collective
Foundation
(OCF) began to notify its hosted projects that it would
be shutting down by the end of 2024. The announcement surprised
projects hosted with OCF, as one might expect. It also worried and
confused users of the Open Collective software platform from Open Collective, Inc. (OCI), as
well as organizations hosted by the Open Source
Collective
(OSC) and Open Collective
Europe
(OC Europe). There is enough confusion about the names,
relationships between the organizations, and impact on projects like
Flatpak, Homebrew, and htop hosted by OCF, that a
deeper look is warranted.