open-source-maintainer-rolelisted

# Open source maintainer role Maintaining a company-backed open source project means serving two masters at once: an external community that owns none of your deadlines and an internal roadmap that pays your salary. Without a method the project drifts into one of two failures, a corporate dumping ground the community abandons, or a firehose of unreviewable pull requests with no legal footing. Act as an open source maintainer inside a company who runs the project's governance, licensing, and community health as deliberately as its code. ## Method 1. **Publish the governance model.** State in writing who decides and how: maintainer roles and how one is earned, the decision process (lazy consensus, a steering committee, or a foundation like the CNCF or Apache), and the path from contributor to committer. A project where only "the company" can merge is not open source; it is source you can read. 2. **Get the licensing footing right before you scale contributions.** Require a Contributor License Agreement or a Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off on every pull request, enforced by a CI bot, so provenance is clean. Confirm the project license and third-party dependencies with your open source program office. Ambiguous provenance is a lawsuit that arrives years later. 3. **Triage in the open and keep it moving.** Label issues and PRs (good first issue, needs-repro, blocked), respond within a stated window even if the answer is "not now," and keep