Building an Open Source community is like building a house. A good house must have a solid foundation, and Open Source projects are no different. The licenses surrounding Open Source, sometimes called Free Software, are part of the foundation of your Open Source project. This module introduces the Open Source Definition, the types of Open Source licenses, and how to be strategic and intentional in your choice of licenses.

The Open Source licenses are the legal foundation of your project. By the end of this module, you should understand how the limits and bounds of your Open Source license impact the rules of your business model.

Lift-off! You know your licensing strategy and you are ready to go Open Source. Now what? This module introduces Open Source forges and collaboration platforms. You will learn how to use these tools effectively and efficiently, as well as ways to structure your project in order to scale with a community over time.

This module is for early-stage Open Source projects that are still in active development. By the end of this module, you should understand common Open Source development workflows and how to enable collaboration with advanced features of your source code-hosting platform.

If everyone knew a programming language, source code alone might be enough. But most people do not know a programming language, and some people who use your project will not be engineers or developers with specialized knowledge. Planning, creating, and maintaining Open Source documentation fills an unavoidable gap to improve accessibility and understanding of your Open Source project. This module introduces the following:

• Common tools and platforms used for Open Source documentation;

• How to build an automated pipeline to deploy new documentation in real-time;

• Building a documentation culture and community in your project;

• Creating structure to enable external contributions to documentation.

By the end of this module, your project will have an Open Source documentation site and a plan on how to maintain the documentation over time. This module is for any Open Source project, at any stage, that wants to improve their documentation acumen and invite others to collaborate and contribute.

As in life, Open Source projects will change over time. As you manage new changes to the source code of a project, how do you verify that new changes do not break existing code? You can spend time manually validating changes and testing them locally. But you can also automate it using workflow automation tools. This module introduces Continuous Integration (C.I.) and Continuous Deployment (C.D.) in an Open Source context.

By the end of this module, your project will have a working CI/CD pipeline for your Open Source repositories. New changes to the repositories will be validated against a basic set of tests, depending on what kind of software you are building. This module is for any Open Source project, at any stage, that wants to improve code quality, code health, and save time from manually testing and validating new code changes.

Building an Open Source community is like building a house. Before you can invite people over, you need a solid foundation to build your community on. If you have completed the previous modules, your project is primed for working with new contributors. This reflective module introduces you to the Mozilla Open Source Archetypes report and understanding a theory of change for Open Source.

By the end of this module, you will have an understanding of the different forms an Open Source project and community may take. You will also be able to identify where your project falls and make predictions on where it will go next. This module is for any Open Source project anticipating growth, change, or evolution to its code or the community.