This blog post is for anyone interested in fostering a truly collaborative environment where universities, companies, and governments can all thrive. This post is designed as a practical guide to help you build those connections.
Making The Case for Academic-Industry Collaboration
Academic institutions and research teams are often using and producing open source software. They’ve become leaders in the field and companies often find it financially beneficial to partner with universities to solve difficult problems. This open innovation and collaboration has led to some amazing technology–from Apache Spark, to Jupiter, to Ceph, to RiscV–that is powering modern society. We can tell a compelling story of how society as a whole can benefit when our brightest minds can work on interesting problems together with companies that have the capacity to build solutions. But for this kind of collaboration to happen, organizations need to know where to find each other.
Open source as a collaboration model is available to universities, companies, and governments equally. Brokers of open source are very often foundations–such as Linux Foundation and Apache Foundations–that provide a legal home and fiscal sponsorship to open source projects and, thus, enable anti-trust-safe environments for cross-collaboration and industry-spanning innovation. For open source to work, it requires people skilled in collaborating and working in the open, and universities can play a role in developing these skills in young people. This is especially important because projects like the Linux Kernel have an ever-aging contributor base. This may lead to an issue with succession when long-standing contributors and maintainers retire from the projects.
Discovering The Need For Better Connections
At the Linux Foundation Member Summit 2025 in Napa, California, we had a session to discuss the range of successes and challenges–and especially, opportunities. A theme emerged from this session: that companies, universities, and governments want to collaborate through open source. However, many don’t know how to find the right collaboration partners. While there is no universal broker that can solve this two-sided market problem, there are many resources available. What’s key is to know what those resources are and how to connect with them. We know from experience that collaboration is often based on existing personal relationships; and that the inverse is also true: that collaboration can help build personal relationships. So, how can we foster even more of these fruitful connections in service of open source research?
Leveraging Brokers To Find Collaborators
Our goal with this blog post is to provide a guide for anyone interested in building a win-win relationship among universities, foundations, companies, and governments. In the chart below, we introduce important players who are open to collaborating and who can broker new connections with potential partners.
- Apereo Foundation – The members are universities and their mission is to assist academia in developing, adopting, and maintaining open source software for teaching, learning, and research. Notable Projects include: uPortal, Sakai.
- CURIOSS – A network of university and research institution OSPOs providing a good entry point for collaborating with a university.
- NumFocus Foundation – Many of the NumFocus supported projects came out of research and directly support research. Notable projects include: NumPy, pandas, mlpack, MDAnalysis, scikit-learn.
- Linux Foundation – They host open source projects with a strong focus on neutral governance to enhance enterprise collaboration. They also host flagship events that bring together academia, government, foundations, and industry. Notable projects include: Linux Kernel, Kubernets, RISC-V, PyTorch, Jupyter Noteboks.
- Software Freedom Conservancy – Strong advocate for the right to repair, improve, and reinstall software. Students may be interested in the paid mentorship program, Outreachy. Notable projects include: Git, BusyBox, Etherpad, Inkscape, and OpenWrt.
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation – Funder of some collaborations that bring academia and companies together.
- Ford Foundation – Funder of some collaborations that bring academia and companies together.
- Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative – Funder for scientific open source projects.
- Schmidt Futures and Schmidt Sciences – Funder for open source projects, such as ecosyste.ms.
- Teaching Open Source – Resources for educators to train the skills for effective open source contributors.
- National Science Foundation – US research funding source, with a growing number of programs supporting open source software, hardware, security, and training.
Upon reflecting on this list, we recognize that we have a gap of institutions and funders outside of the United States. We acknowledge this blind spot and we would love to extend this list. Please let us know who else we can add to this list.
Attending Events To Establish Collaborations
Personal relationships help tremendously in forming new collaborations. And one effective way to establish personal relationships is to attend events and meet people in person. The shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic led to many organizations forgetting how important in-person events are for doing business, research, and governing. This is still felt at events where we have fewer attendees than we had before the pandemic. However, those who are not at the events are missing out on the opportunities to form new personal relationships and discover the potential partners for collaborations.
We are therefore listing here a selection of events that can be a good starting point for getting to know more people who are doing open source.
This list is a fantastic resource created by Mesrenyame Dogbe: list of open source events.
Meeting the CHAOSS Working Groups
A special mention goes to the CHAOSS Working Groups. CHAOSS is focused on conversations around open source community health. The working groups within CHAOSS are organized by stakeholders who discuss community health from the perspective of their specific contexts. This makes the CHAOSS Working Groups and excellent place to connect with potential partners, who are already collaborating within CHAOSS and are often open to collaborating on related topics one-on-one. The working groups are:
- OSPO: The OSPO Metrics working group aims to advance how organizations understand the value that open source projects can provide as well as the value of these programs / initiatives. This is a joint effort between the CHAOSS project and the TODO Group.
- University / Academic: The University working group is a joint effort between the CHAOSS project and the OSPO++ community that aims to create a set of recommendations for metrics related to university open source software, particularly as they relate to what might be seen as “success” for university leadership, faculty, students, and staff, keeping in mind that these actors may evaluate success differently.
- Science / Research: The Science working group aims create a set of recommendations for metrics and models related to scientific open source communities.
- Data Science: We collaborate with data scientists and researchers to shape how we understand open source community health and make it easier for people to use CHAOSS tools, metrics, and metrics models to draw meaningful insights that they can use to improve open source project health using data science-based approaches.
- UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): The UN SDG working group focuses on using CHAOSS metrics to help understand the role of open source projects and their progress toward achieving the UN SDGs.
- Funding Impact Measurement: The funding WG aims to develop frameworks, metrics, and methodologies for measuring and understanding the impacts of funding on open source software development.
- Package Metadata: The Package Metadata Working Group explores how different package managers capture, expose, and structure metadata.
- Accessibility and Disability Inclusion. This group aims to bring more People With Disabilities into open source, and they support other working groups with guidance on accessibility inclusion.
Cultivating Win-Win Open Source and Research Partnerships
The foundation for successful open source research partnerships is built on making the right connections. We highlighted several CHAOSS Working groups where you can find such connections. We also listed organizations like the Linux Foundation, NumFocus, and networks like CURIOSS, who are crucial brokers in this ecosystem, providing the legal, technical, and community framework for academia, industry, and government to collaborate effectively. The challenge is knowing where to look and who to meet. We’ve offered suggestions for engaging these key players and attending events to start forging the personal relationships that power great innovation. We encourage you to use these resources to find your next partner in open source research.
What other organizations and resources, especially from other regions, should be added to this guide to help connect the global community?
Special thanks for the help with this blog post go to: Emily Lovell, Hilary Carter, Julia Lawson, Nithya Ruff, and Stephanie Lieggi
