Publish a New Open Source Project

This page highlights the steps you’ll take when it comes to publishing company code as an open source project. We require you to follow this process to help prevent over disclosure of information that could result in problems related to copyright, patent, trademark, or information we need to protect. As you plan your publication, remember that you must complete the review process and obtain SDRT approval before you publish any code externally.

Step Zero: Planning for Success

Publishing a project is just the start of an open source project’s life. Be sure to allocate developer resources to prepare and maintain the projects you publish. If you are not prepared to maintain an open source project, to promote it, respond to the community, or fix security alerts, we’re not prepared to go through the steps of publishing the project. We don’t want to publish dead projects, so if you are not prepared for the long game, let’s talk about why you want to publish code you don’t want to support.

Also before publishing a new project, let’s find out if we could contribute your project (or parts thereof) to an existing open source project. It is usually better to contribute to an existing project than to create a brand new one. So let’s really make sure this is what we, and the open source community needs. If we are invested and the community is very receptive, then let’s proceed with this overview on how to launch a new project.

Step 1: Prepare Your Request

Propose a name for your project. We’ll explain why some names won’t work.
Add a copyright notice to the top of each source code file written by a Power employee.
Prepare the repository for publication based on our repository standard.
Create a private branch (or separate repository) on Github and grant us read access so we can review your code.
Collect the list of employees who will need write access to the project once it’s published.
Open a ticket to initiate the review request.

Step 2: Get Approvals

The SDRT handles most open source project approval steps for you. You can find the details on the Approvals page of this guide. Keep in mind there may be other approvals you should have in hand before coming to us, and these depend on the nature of the project you seek to publish.

Make sure your team has approved your plan to publish this project before you request a publication review. We have a step in the review process where we ask about other people at the company who may need to endorse this publication too.

Step 3: Release and Publicize

We’ll create the public repository for your project and invite the internal team to the repo. We’ll keep the repo private initially and we (or you) will configure the relevant settings, webhooks, etc.
You push the code to the new repository. Make sure you have a description, topics, and website link (if applicable) on the project.
You create a communications plan to promote your project in the external communication channels. We’re here to help you promote your project by reviewing your blog posts or other presentation materials.
Once we’re staged, we’ll perform a final review and then turn the repo from private to public.
Based on the comms plan, we’ll publicize your project and encourage collaborations and contributions.

Process

We’re here for the details:

We encourage you to check out other resources for additional helpful information.