What are indicators of ineffective policy?

What is a good template for a corporate open source contribution policy or an example of an in-use policy that a company has made public?

• I've found plenty of articles explaining why having a policy is important and some examples of companies that have such a policy but haven't found many good examples of policies themselves. I'm looking for a good template on which to base a proposed policy for my own organization.

• Answer:

  Not a template, but here is how things work at Facebook. This might help you draft a template. We care about two things: 1. if someone external to the company is making a contribution, we ask them to sign a CLA before merging their pull request. Thankfully we only require this once for any given contributor (irrespective of the repo where the contribution is going). The CLA mainly grants the company copy & patent rights. Personally, I wished the CLA was universally implied by the pull request, but that's not how american law works. You can read the CLA here: https://developers.facebook.com/opensource/cla 2. if a Facebook engineer wants to open a piece of code, we don't have a formal policy, but we have an open source team (composed of technical and legal folks) to help out with the process. Things boil down to: making sure there are no trademarks conflicting with the project's name. making sure all the employees who worked on a piece of code are on board / clearing any concerns they might have. The discussions usually involve around long term community commitment and are there other similar projects out there. talking to lawyers to make sure there aren't any patent or other strategic issues around the code. Also coordinating with PR folks if the project is a major piece of code and you want to have a public announcement or need help promoting the launch. In general, if an engineer decides to initially start a project on github, there are no requirements. This is however only possible if the project does not have any internal dependencies. We are also usually free to contribute to existing open source projects.