About Open Tech Foundation

OTF is built around seven constraints. These constraints are one of the reasons OTF exists as a separate organization. They are not features that we selectively apply to individual projects; they form a common baseline for the technology we build.

• 01

  Accessibility

  Technology should be accessible and usable by as many people as possible.

• 02

  Interoperability

  Technology should work across systems without unnecessary dependence on a particular vendor, runtime, or platform.

• 03

  Privacy

  Zero telemetry. No tracking, analytics beacons, or phoning home.

• 04

  Security

  Security is treated as a fundamental part of designing, building, and maintaining our technology.

• 05

  Transparency

  Our technology, decisions, limitations, and development should be open and understandable.

• 06

  Sustainability

  Technology should remain practical to operate, maintain, and use over the long term.

• 07

  Community Governance

  Governance belongs to people and the community, rather than corporate interests.

We choose correctness before chasing speed or performance numbers.

Performance and efficiency remain important engineering considerations, but we do not optimize projects simply to produce better benchmark results or claim that something is the fastest.

A project should first do what it promises to do, correctly and reliably.

We aim to minimize external project and package dependencies wherever practical.

Every external dependency introduces additional code, maintainers, infrastructure, release processes, and potentially transitive dependencies that a project must trust.

Reducing unnecessary dependencies helps us reduce exposure to software supply-chain attacks and keeps the trust surface of our projects smaller.

This is not a prohibition on external dependencies. When a dependency provides clear technical value, we can use it deliberately.

OTF does not accept external projects for incubation.

Projects developed under OTF remain within our development and security expectations from their beginning. This helps us maintain a more controlled project surface and minimize security vulnerabilities and risks introduced through externally originated codebases.

This does not prevent outside participation. Individuals, communities, and companies are welcome to contribute technically to OTF projects.

OTF projects use Semantic Versioning (SemVer) where applicable.

Releases, however, are intentional human decisions.

A commit, merge, or automated workflow does not by itself decide that a new release should exist. A human decides when a project is ready, what the release represents, and the appropriate version change.

Automation can handle the repetitive mechanics after that decision.

This also preserves the actual intention of the changelog. A changelog should explain what a release means rather than simply being an automatically generated history of commits.

OTF membership and governance are for individuals, not corporations.

A company cannot become an OTF member, hold voting rights, or receive a governance seat. Employment by a company does not prevent someone from participating in OTF; they participate as an individual.

At the same time, we are open to working technically with companies and enterprises.

They can contribute code, testing, interoperability work, bug reports, technical discussions, implementations, and other useful work to OTF projects.

Technical collaboration does not grant governance authority.

Commercial companies cannot sponsor an individual OTF project.

Companies can provide general support to Open Tech Foundation, but financial support cannot be attached to a particular project in a way that gives the supporter influence over that project's technical direction.

Supporting OTF does not purchase control over project roadmaps, releases, technical decisions, or governance.

Maintaining open technology requires infrastructure and resources.

OTF currently considers several ways of supporting that work:

• Public donations
• General support through GitHub Sponsors
• Selected advertising on OTF-operated websites

Advertising is a source of revenue for maintaining the organization; it is not project sponsorship.

Financial support does not provide governance rights or control over OTF projects.

OTF is open to people who want to use, test, discuss, improve, or contribute to our technology.

To learn about contributing, participation, and membership, visit our Get Involved page.

You can also support the Foundation and the work required to keep its projects available and maintained.

Most importantly, feedback of any kind is welcome. We want people to question our decisions, identify problems, propose improvements, and tell us where we can do better.