Open Source Guides (https://opensource.guide/) are a collection of resources for individuals, communities, and companies who want to learn how to run and contribute to an open source project.

The first set of Open Source Guides were created and curated by GitHub, along with input from outside community reviewers, but they are not exclusive to GitHub products.

Our goal is to aggregate community best practices, not what GitHub (or any other individual or entity) thinks is best. Therefore, we try to use examples and quotations from others to illustrate our points.

Open Source Guides are a resource and a discussion forum. One reason we started this project is because we felt that there weren't enough resources for people creating open source projects. We made these guides open source in hopes that you'll use this space to talk about best practices, then document them when you've found consensus. We'd like this to be a safe space to talk about what's hard, what's scary, and what's simply confusing about running open source projects.

We've shared our vision and priorities for this project in our roadmap.

Our goal is for this project to reflect community best practices, so we'd love your input! Got a question or an idea? Check out our contributing guidelines for ways to offer feedback and contribute.

Content is released under CC-BY-4.0, which gives you permission to use content for almost any purpose (but does not grant you any trademark permissions), so long as you note the license and give credit, such as follows:

Content based on github.com/github/open-source-guide used under the CC-BY-4.0 license.

Code, including source files and code samples if any in the content, is released under CC0-1.0.

This means you can use the code and content in this repository except for GitHub trademarks in your own projects.

When you contribute to this repository you are doing so under the above licenses.

Screenshots in the guide are used according to various permissions.

The initial release of these guides were authored by @nayafia, @bkeepers, @stephbwills, and @mlinksva.

Thanks to @aitchabee, @benbalter, @brettcannon, @caabernathy, @coralineada, @dmleong, @ericholscher, @gr2m, @janl, @jessfraz, @joshsimmons, @kfogel, @kytrinyx, @lee-dohm, @mikeal, @mikemcquaid, @nathansobo, @nruff, @nsqe, @orta, @parkr, @shazow, @steveklabnik, and @wooorm for lending their valuable input and expertise leading up to the initial release, and to @sophshep and @jeejkang for designing and illustrating the guides.

While we've got advice about running an open source project, we're not lawyers. Be sure to read our disclaimer before diving in.