Chainguard aims to improve stewardship of mature open source projects
What happens to open source projects when they reach maturity? When a project has fulfilled its purpose and become foundational to customer workloads, it no longer requires a roadmap of sweeping changes. What it needs is safe, predictable maintenance after the creators have moved on.
However, it remains essential that stays OSS safe and supported when its maintainers are ready to step away, or the project no longer needs constant upkeep. To address this challenge Chainguard is launching EmeritOSS, a model for supporting mature open source projects and long-term OSS sustainability for the community.
EmeritOSS provides stability-focused maintenance for select unmaintained and archived open source projects so teams who depend on these projects can plan their next steps. Various levels of support are on offer depending on community expectations and the project’s lifecycle. These include creating a public fork of the project to preserve ongoing access to the codebase, updating dependencies to fix vulnerabilities and creating new releases with the updates.
It can also publish clear documentation outlining support scope and service levels, and build EmeritOSS projects from source and adding them to Chainguard’s image catalog when needed, along with updated APK packages where applicable.
You can find out more about EmeritOSS on the Chainguard site. If your organization depends on an archived or unmaintained project, you can submit it to Chainguard for consideration so it can help keep the essential OSS running safely for as long as you need it.
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