Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

We all want our open source projects to be sustainable, healthy, and successful. Good governance has a much larger impact on sustainability, health, and project success than many people realize. Being proactive about governance before something escalates into a crisis can help avoid misunderstandings and make your projects more sustainable and successful.

A lightweight governance model created at the beginning of a project can provide basic guidance about roles, expectations, and decision-making processes. As the project grows and matures, governance can be expanded over time to become more robust as the project evolves. However, good governance is about more than just defining roles and decision-making processes. It can be part of the process of building a sustainable leadership pipeline and can help to create an intentional culture that encourages participation and contributions from others.

This talk will provide details about the importance of governance, how to define project governance, using governance as a pathway to leadership, creating an intentional culture, and making project ownership (e.g., individual, organization, foundation) decisions.

Project X goes EOL at the end of this sentence; good luck with the CVEs. Project Y has a new license meaning you can’t use it anymore; what do you mean, your team built something important on it? Project Z works great but you built a new feature in your fork, and now you can’t take the upstream patches. Half of your open source environments may have a dependency on some now-defunct project, and now everyone’s scrambling for solutions.



Join experienced open source maintainers to discuss what warning signs can help prevent abrupt retirement or relicensing from taking your end users by surprise. We’ll outline the ways you can get visibility into your software supply chain and become active in the upstreams that matter most for your needs, ensuring that you’re in control of your own destiny no matter what storm of alphabet soup comes your way.

When does maintaining a project become more harmful than helpful? As the leader of the OpenJS Foundation, home to Node.js and more, I will give a candid talk to unpack the hardest question in open source: how do you know when it’s time to let go? Drawing from real-world examples from leading one of the web’s most widely used open source foundations and its JavaScript projects like Lodash, jQuery, and Express, I will explore what it means to responsibly sunset a project, merge with others, or double down on maintenance. You’ll learn how to read the signs for security and sustainability, engage the community, and what it takes to wrap up a project with integrity, especially when billions of developers still rely on it.

FLOSS Mentorship Unconference: A Community Event to Share, Shape, & Scale Mentoring Efforts in Open Source (Open to All Attendees; No Pre-registration Required)

An unconference afternoon for anyone engaged in open source mentorship -- or who would like to be. We’ll build the agenda on-the-spot, then move into focused discussions to share best practices, challenges, and aspirations. Expect to leave with new contacts and a shared action list for better, more sustainable mentoring. Topics crowdsourced day-of – join us just to listen, or to pitch one of your own!