Controlled Ecosystem Archetype
Characteristics: Real community involvement, and diversity of community motivations, but with a shared understanding that the founder (or some credible entity) will act as “benevolent dictator”. Requires experienced open source community management on part of project leaders and occasional willingness to compromise. Works best when technical architecture directly supports out-of-core innovation and customization, such as via a plugin system.
Controlled Ecosystem efforts find much of their value in that ecosystem. The core pro vides base value, but the varied contributions across a healthy plugin ecosystem allow the project to address a much larger and diverse set of needs than any one project could tackle alone. Over time, these projects might see more and more of the core functionality structured as plugins as the product becomes more customizable and pluggable. This increasingly lets the plugins determine the end-user experience, and the core project can eventually become infrastructure.
Examples: Wordpress, Drupal
Licensing: Can be either copyleft or non-copyleft. When copyleft, decisions must be made about whether the core interfaces (and maintainer-promulgated legal interpretations) encourage or discourage proprietary plugins.
Community standards: Welcoming, often with structures designed to promote participation and introduce new contributors
Component coupling: Loosely coupled modules, frequently in a formal plugin system.
Main benefits: Builds a sustainable ecosystem in which the founding organization retains strong influence.
Typical governance: Benevolent dictatorship, with significant willingness to compromise to avoid forks.
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