How to design and organize a project?

What are the most sustainable governance models to organize the development of an Open Source project as well as a startup dedicated to the success of that project?

• I want to organize an open source project in the way that passionate people would participate. However, I am not sure who owns the company or project? How should we organize the stakeholders to better motivate active participation?

• Answer:

  I edited the question a bit as it was unclear. I think it is asking about two things that have to be separated: how to get people to participate in an Open Source project. how to organize a company that provides services around the project. Let me add a few things that should be clarified. In a traditional commercial venture, a company creates a product and sells it. Traditional software is owned by a company and kept secret. They license their clients to use the software, but usually don't allow anyone else to see the code. Open Source projects take a very different approach. The project is created in the open. Anyone can see the code. Anyone can take the code, use it, and change it. Depending on the license you use for the project, people might have the freedom to re-license the code, or you could restrict them to only use a specific limited set of licenses. Then as a company, you are competing with any other company who could do exactly what you are doing. They can take the same code and sell services, training, etc. too. How do you get people to contribute?  Well, it depends (of course), but you should assume that no one is going to give you something for nothing. People will contribute if they are paid to (the most common model), or if they find real value in participating -- this value could be "soft value" in terms of street credibility, pride, a sense of giving back to a project they care about, a great way to learn something; or a hard value like -- an ability to compete with you and make money, an ability to create something that you might want to buy, etc. So Open Source code is in the open. GitHub is a very popular place to put code these days, but it's not the only place, of course. Many projects are on http://Code.Google.com, some are donated to a foundation (e.g Apache Software Foundation), some manage their own way. The idea though is that you deliberately blur "us" vs. "them", everyone can participate (which could be great or not :-)).  How about your company?  It's a company. This means you create a very clear idea of "us" vs. "them".  Employees are employees. Everyone else is either a customer, competitor, target acquisition, potential acquirer, partner, etc. But it's important to note that the Open Source project and the commercial startup company are two very different things.