We as a company building software are heavily reliant on and invested in Open Source. Our products would not be able to exist without the work of thousands of developers that do not work for us. Open source is vital to our business. We build our software on top of the work of community heroes. The open source efforts of individuals and companies allow us to focus on our core business and build great software. We ♥️ Open Source.

We cannot be only consumers and expect premium support from passionate individuals. We recognize we share the responsibility of keeping the ecosystem and the Open Source community healthy.

We will stimulate all efforts inside our company around creating a healthy culture towards the use and contribution of OSS by:

• Having our developers adhere to the SOS Developer Guidelines.
• Sharing our own learnings with the world. Through talks, blogs, videos and educational content.
• Sharing our code that could help others as Open Source where possible, considering intellectual property of our core business and security.
• Allowing our developers to contribute code and documentation to relevant projects during working hours and on company hardware.
• Not forcing our agendas to an open source project.
• Helping out or sponsoring projects and maintainers that are crucial for our business.
• Letting maintainers know that our company is using their project to raise momentum and credibility. For instance by filling in an adopter form or editing the ADOPTERS.md.

By committing to the Sustainable Open Source initiative we believe we will have a positive effect on the community and on our own business. By getting familiar with the Open Source way of working, our own code and documentation quality will improve. We will be a great place to work for like minded developers. The projects we love and rely on will blossom and might even become a source of income for the maintainer.

We want our developers to help us make the ecosystem a better place. We will make sure that our developers will follow these guidelines.

• When interacting, be friendly, be inclusive, be professional, follow the code of conduct (CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md). (when not specified follow Contributor Covenant)
• Improve the quality of forums by voting on answers that have helped you.
• Improve the quality of forums making sure questions won't be left unanswered when you found a solution.
• When intending to contribute to a project, read the CONTRIBUTING.md and consult the maintainer (for instance by creating an issue) before you start, don't waste their time nor yours.
• Respect the maintainer's vision.
• Follow the existing style.
• Keep pull requests small, avoid breaking changes.
• Write tests and documentation.
• No "spray and pray", follow up on your contributions.
• If you committed to a chunk of work, and timelines change, communicate as soon as you can.

This initiative has been created to help companies create a guideline to improve the culture around open source and pay back to the community.

Do you also want to improve the way your company and people think about and use open source?

1. Fork sosinitiative under your own GitHub organization to commit publicly and get added to the ADOPTERS.md.
2. Make a start with your contributions page
3. Share your commitment with the world! #sosinitiative
4. Update your contributions page every time you make a new accomplishment