📝 Note: This repo is a draft to explore an idea. It tries to be reasonably thorough to convey the concept, but there are lots of holes and details to sort through, and none of it has undergone any kind of legal review. Discussions are open and input is welcome!

Inspired by the legacy of The Codehaus, The Commonhaus Foundation is a collaborative environment, a shared space where innovation thrives, and where projects remain the focus. We aim to provide a neutral home where longevity, security, and innovation converge.

Content Creation: Champion the development of innovative tools, libraries, and frameworks, enabling the community to build groundbreaking solutions.

Ecosystem Health: Prioritize the security, longevity, and accessibility of Commonhaus projects.

Open Source Assurance: Guarantee to the community that all code under our banner will remain open source, ensuring its consistent and long-term availability in trusted repositories like Maven Central.

Project Autonomy: Empower project maintainers with the freedom to define their governance. Our foundation strives for simplicity, eliminating 'pay-to-play' models and minimizing administrative overhead.

Preservation of Project Identity: Unlike many foundations, where projects get absorbed into the larger brand, Commonhaus projects not only retain but celebrate their original identities. While domain names and trademarks are donated, they don't dissolve into the foundation's overarching brand. Your project remains unmistakably yours.

Simplified Governance with Core Principles: We believe in an uncluttered approach with only two non-negotiable tenets:

• Transparency: Whatever your governance model – be it single-vendor driven, a benevolent dictator system, or a cooperative consensus approach – it's welcome here. All we ask is clarity. Document how your project is run so everyone's on the same page.

• Succession Planning: While we encourage autonomy, The Commonhaus Foundation requires administrative rights to project assets. This is not for oversight but to ensure that if a project's original stewards move on, the project can continue to serve the community. This is our commitment to the long-term health and sustainability of every project under our roof.

Empowerment Over Enforceability: The Commonhaus Foundation isn't about restrictive walls or ceilings. It's about providing a foundation (quite literally) that lets each project rise and expand in its unique trajectory. Our role is more of a facilitator than a regulator.

Action Over Deliberation: At The Commonhaus Foundation, we emphasize practicality over prolonged deliberation. While discourse and discussion have their merits, we proudly prioritize projects that 'do' over those that 'discuss'. Specifically, we champion:

• Application Frameworks: Simplified app development and deployment? Count us in.
• Libraries: We're fans of anything that reduces the complexities our applications must grapple with.

However, not everything aligns with our vision:

• Specifications & Standards: They're important, but we steer clear of defining or debating them.
• Discussion-Centric Groups: Working groups or SIGs focused primarily on specifications? Not for us.
• Peripheral API Projects: Projects that solely prop up specifications? They're better suited elsewhere.

In essence, we focus on being a home to code-centric projects.

No Pay-to-Play: The foundation will not require monetary contributions for participation.

Volunteer Board: Comprising user group leaders, owners of longstanding libraries and application frameworks, and other community leaders.

Licensing: We adhere to open-source licensing as defined by the OSI (See the Licensing section of The Commonhaus Foundation IP Policy Guidance).

The cornerstones of our sponsorship approach are transparency and utility. As our needs and initiatives evolve, we pledge to keep our community in the loop regarding fund utilization.

Direct Project Support: Unlike some other foundations, when you sponsor a project under The Commonhaus Foundation, the lion's share – if not the entirety – of your contribution directly supports the project maintainers in their endeavors.

Foundation Support: Sponsoring The Commonhaus Foundation as a whole bolsters our unified capability to aid member projects and essential ecosystem cornerstones, like Maven Central. Working alongside infrastructure partners, our goal is to minimize costs linked to the upkeep of projects within The Commonhaus Foundation.

• Code of Conduct
• Commonhaus Council and Charter
• Succession Planning