Open source development thrives on remixing existing projects to solve new problems. The author reflects on years of finding projects that almost meet requirements, forking them, and contributing improvements back to the community.
Experience running open source programs at Cisco and working with OpenTelemetry demonstrated that successful projects extend beyond code itself. Decisions about licensing, what to publish, and how projects evolve matter tremendously. The field has accumulated substantial guidance on these questions through established resources.
Bronto structured its open source strategy using a two-organization model. The official brontoio GitHub organization houses supported integrations and tools for the main product. Meanwhile, “bronto-community is where everything else grows: community maintained, and free to move fast, break things or be gloriously unfinished.”
This approach follows patterns established by organizations like Mozilla and the CNCF, which recognize that projects naturally take different forms and evolve over time. The thinking emphasizes deliberate decision-making about projects’ futures rather than allowing them to stagnate through inaction. At Bronto’s scale, this represents a philosophical commitment to responsible open source stewardship.