The RIT Linux Users group (RITlug) main website is an opensource project.
The RIT Linux Users group (RITlug) main website is an open-source project.
RITlug is a student-led organization at RIT that aims to engage students in Linux and
open source.
The website is written using Jekyll which is a ruby project for static website generation.
The website itself is hosted on [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com/)
Jekyll is nice because it enables you to do templating and write content for the
website in [markdown](https://www.markdownguide.org/).
This is also the project that I chose to do my HFOSS [bug fix](https://jrtechs.net/open-source/ritlug-bugfix) with.
This is also the project that I chose to do my HFOSS [bug fix](https://jrtechs.net/open-source/ritlug-bugfix).
### Links
@ -56,23 +59,74 @@ This section explores the differences between the two projects.
It is important to note that there is not a once size fits all for open-source projects.
Just because one project has more/less of something does not necessarily mean that
one is better than the other.
The beauty of open-source is the ability for a project to take many shapes/sizes/forms.
The beauty of open-source is the ability of a project to take many shapes/sizes/forms.
## Scope
// contributors
There is no denying that on-my-zsh is a massive open-source project.
On-my-zsh is highly praised and recommended by people wanting to "rice" their terminal setup.
This project has 19k forks and 1.5k contributors... that is big.
Although there are a large number of contributors, most people don't have a huge role in the project. A lot of the contributors are adding themes to on-my-zsh and doing minor bug fixes.
Dispute not holding big roles, the large number of contributors suggests that it is relatively easy to become a part of this community.
On-my-zsh has received so many PR's for new themes that they asked people to [stop submitting](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki/External-themes) them and to create them as separate git repos with a specific naming convention so they are easy to search for.
// screen grabs from GH
In contrast on on-my-zsh, the RITlug website project is relatively small with 16 total contributors.
The contributors are largely limited to members of RITlug's eboard (leadership board) with little activity from the community at large.
Members through this project tend to cycle through every few years as they roll through RITlug's eboard.
## Maturity
//how old
The on-my-zsh project is a decade old and still kicking strong!
This project is well developed and has very robust documentation in
their wiki for people looking to contribute to this project and for those looking to use it.
RITlug's website project is relatively new at 4 years old, but, like oh-my-zsh has remained active for its entire duration.
## Governance
//who has access to it
// license
### Leadership
Determining the leadership is often hard for a project in the medium to small scale.
The issue isn't that there is absolutely no leadership, the issue is that the
leadership often isn't documented or is on such a small scale that it is trivial.
Larger projects like Fedora and Ubuntu have well-defined roles, etc for their project.
Smaller projects often don't have these levels of leadership and transparency.
I fall victim to this for all my projects on GitHub, the leadership is quite literally "me" and I'm making all the calls and I'm just managing the dozen or so people that I manage to get to work on my project.
Having this type of leadership is often bad because once the main contributor leaves, the project may die or fall apart.
As the current president of RITlug, I have particular insight into how RITlug operates its open-source project.
The leadership of the project shifts every year after public (to RIT students) elections.
There are typically between 4-6 eboard members per year.
It requires two members of eboard to approve a pull request for the website.
There is a special eboard role for managing projects, however, that role is often vacant and is just filled in my eboard members that have a familiarity for that project.
If the project is large enough like [TeleIRC](https://github.com/RITlug/teleirc), we allow that one to manage itself as a "team" with loose oversight from the eboard.
The RITlug website is solely maintained by the RITlug Eboard for administrative tasks such as weekly emails and posting talks.
Although we don't ever explicitly document the leadership of the project, it would be possible to figure out by reading the RITlug [runbook](http://runbook.ritlug.com/).
Opposed to RITlug which has a quasi-public leadership board, the upper leaderships for on-my-zsh can be traced back to the company Planet Argon.
This company is located in Portland and focuses on Ruby on Rails development as a consultant for commercial companies. Like many companies, this company has a large
footprint in [open-source projects](https://www.planetargon.com/open-source).
From public documentation, it is not clear how the on-my-zsh project is run.
Based on other projects, we can assume that the company appoints certain people to manage the project.
### License
The code for both projects falls under the MIT license which is a permissive open source license. The RITlug website is more unique in that it has a creative commons license for
# Takeaways
// no one size fits all
When it comes to projects, no one size fits all.
In both projects that I looked at they had backing from a more established institution such as a student club or a company.
Future research in community architecture could dive deeper into how most open source communities layout their upper leadership and who funds the projects.
It is becoming more and more common to find open-source projects with large commercial backers.
