Ten Successful Projects and What to Steal From Them

Success in open source doesn’t look like success anywhere else. The most deployed database in the world calls itself “not open-contribution”, and one of the most installed tools has had the same lead for 28 years. Here are ten projects, what “successful” means for each, and one thing you can steal from each of them.

Ten projects, no common recipe#

As of September 2026:

A dictator, a committee, a foundation, a company: each model shows up here at least once. None of them is the reason these projects work. Writing it down is.

Linux: write down who owns what#

Kernel 7.2 took 16,418 changes from 2,652 developers, 613 of them contributing for the first time, according to LWN’s statistics: a record. Nobody reads all of that. The kernel’s process documentation says it plainly: “no single developer could possibly inspect and select every patch unassisted”. So each part of the code has a maintainer and a tree, and patches climb a chain of trust to Linus.

The map of that chain is one text file. As of September 30, 2026, MAINTAINERS has about 3,330 entries in 30,218 lines: for any file, who reviews it, which list to write to, and which tree it goes through.

Steal this: write down who owns what. For your project, it’s a CODEOWNERS file, from the day there’s a second maintainer (The Files That Turn a Repository Into a Project).

curl: work in public, and say who pays#

curl’s governance document says the project “matches a standard BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) style project”, with Daniel Stenberg as the dictator. It works because the dictator does everything in public: the code, the decisions, and a blog about the project. The THANKS file lists about 3,786 names as of September 2, 2026.

The money follows the same logic. curl’s sponsors page says “the best way to sponsor this project is to allow a paid engineer or two to spend work hours on curl”, and the governance document says who pays Daniel: “Daniel works for wolfSSL”.

Steal this: work in public, and write down who pays. Both answer the question a company asks before it lets an engineer spend work hours on your project.

SQLite: open source without pull requests#

SQLite counts more than 4 billion smartphones, each with hundreds of SQLite databases. It’s open source by any definition: the code is in the public domain. It’s not open to contributions, and says so:

The page even asks people “not be offended if we rewrite your patch from scratch”. That’s the price of keeping every line in the public domain, and the project would rather tell you than let you find out.

Steal this: you can be open source and not take pull requests. Say so in the README and in CONTRIBUTING.md, before someone spends a weekend on one.

PostgreSQL: spread the keys across employers#

“What company owns PostgreSQL?” is in the press FAQ, and the answer is one word: “None.” The project is “an unincorporated association of volunteers and companies”. Companies pay people to work on it, and none of them holds it: as of September 2026, the seven members of the Core Team work for six different employers. The 31 committers are added about once a year, by a vote of the existing ones.

Steal this: spread the keys across employers. When a company that pays a maintainer walks away, the project shouldn’t walk away with it.

Kubernetes: give it to a foundation none of you owns#

Google wrote Kubernetes, then gave it away on purpose. When the Cloud Native Computing Foundation was announced on July 21, 2015, Google contributed Kubernetes as its seed project, and its IP moved to the foundation in March 2016. Competitors could now contribute to something they didn’t hand to a rival.

They did. Google and Red Hat made 83% of the contributions before the project joined the CNCF, and 46% by June 2023, according to a CNCF report on the project.

Steal this: if you want competitors to contribute, put the project somewhere none of you owns. Governance covers when that’s worth it.

Blender: publish the money#

Blender became open source because its users bought it. In July 2002, the “Free Blender” campaign raised €110,000 in seven weeks “to regain Blender from its investors” (Blender’s history). The project has shown its money ever since. The Development Fund puts the monthly total on its home page:

Every grant has been published on blender.org since 2011, and the 2025 annual report itemizes €5,713,078 of income, €928,192 of it from individual fund members.

Steal this: publish what comes in and what it pays for. Open Collective shows the first half for you; the second is a blog post a year.

Godot: budget on the floor, not on the peak#

Godot moved its donations from Patreon to its own Development Fund on September 12, 2023, to “significantly reduce platform fees”. Patreon had brought $15,366 a month at the start of 2023. The new fund started at €25,591 a month and reached €54,754 by the end of the year, according to the Godot Foundation’s 2023 report.

Then it came down. As of September 30, 2026, the fund brings in €35,249 a month: more than twice what Patreon brought at the start of 2023, and a third less than the peak.

Steal this: budget on the floor, not on the peak. A spike in attention is a good month, not a salary.

VS Code: say where the repository ends#

The repository and the product are two different things, and the README says so: Visual Studio Code “is a distribution of the Code - OSS repository with Microsoft-specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license”. The source is MIT. The editor you download isn’t.

Users noticed. VSCodium ships the MIT build with telemetry off. And because the Marketplace terms limit its extensions to Microsoft’s products, the Eclipse Foundation runs Open VSX for everyone else: 18,658 extensions as of September 30, 2026.

Steal this: if your product and your repository differ, say where the line is. Microsoft’s README does it in one sentence.

Astro: docs are contributions#

Astro’s documentation repository has more contributors than the framework itself, as of September 30, 2026. That’s by design. The project’s governance counts “updating documentation or fixing a typo” as a contribution, the docs have their own contribution guide, and the community translates them into 13 languages. Astro Badges gives a badge for a first docs pull request and a first translation, like it does for code.

The company behind Astro joined Cloudflare on January 16, 2026, with the promise that “Astro stays open-source and MIT-licensed”.

Steal this: count docs and translations as contributions, in your governance and in your credits. The community chapter has the ways to credit them.

Bootstrap: give the project its own organization#

Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton created Bootstrap at Twitter and released it on August 19, 2011. A year later, on September 29, 2012, Mark wrote that they had “begun working to move Bootstrap into its own open source organization”. On July 27, 2013, the repository moved to twbs/bootstrap, where it still is.

Bootstrap kept shipping after that, including breaking changes: v5, on May 5, 2021, removed jQuery. Twelve people are on the team as of September 2026, and Julien, who writes this guide, is one of them.

Steal this: put the project in its own organization, not in your employer’s account or your personal one. Moving it later took Bootstrap ten months.

Go further#

• The Many Shapes of Open Source: the map these ten sit on, and what open source ships beyond software.
• Governance: the models behind the “who decides” column, and how to pick one.
• LWN’s kernel development statistics: who wrote kernel 7.2, by developer and by employer, published for every release.
• curl’s governance document: a one-page model for a project led by one person.