Is it for your project?

It might suit you if your project is

• Big and broad — an application, not a library.
• User-facing — used directly by people who aren't developers.
• Expensive to keep good — it needs steady, paid work on quality and security, not occasional fixes.
• At risk of capture — the obvious funders would end up steering it.
• Something you're ready to give away — to a trust you don't control, permanently.

Stick with open source if

• it's a library, a tool or a component other software builds on;
• it's small enough for volunteers or a single sponsor to keep healthy;
• its value comes from being used everywhere, with no friction at all; or
• you want to keep control of it yourself.

MIT, Apache and the GPL family are excellent licences. We use MIT for our own small libraries. Open ownership isn't a replacement for open source and we don't expect it to become one.

What you'd be signing up to

1. Settle the copyright on a trust whose deed you can't change afterwards — including by you.
2. Collect contributor agreements so the trust holds all the copyright. The licence is new and untested, so it may need fixing or reissuing, and that's only possible if the copyright is held in one place.
3. Take no special power. No founder seat, no veto, no royalty. Wages for real work only.
4. Wait for the member organisations to form. Until one exists, nobody owes anything.
5. Accept the honest label: source available, not open source.

A test we found useful

Would you be happy if a thousand people found your software wonderful and built a community around it, rather than a billion downloads with companies repackaging it? If yes, keep reading. If you'd rather have the billion, open source is the better bet.