A black man in a gray suit sits in an office conference room, hand on chin in a thoughtful pose, looking sideways with a skeptical expression. Two women work at a desk in the background near a glass wall covered in colorful sticky notes.

OSPO Notes: Open Source Governance โ€” Who Decides, and How

Every open source project eventually hits a moment where someone has to make a call nobody agreed on in advance โ€” and governance is the system that determines who has the authority to make it. This post walks through every major governance model in plain language, from BDFLs and do-ocracies to lazy consensus and multi-stakeholder consortia, including how mature projects like Kubernetes layer several models at once. MkDocs is included as a real-world example of what happens when governance gets skipped entirely.

March 31, 2026 ยท Chris Short