Regularly contribute to an open source project under European governance or under a neutral foundation#
What this is, concretely#
This commitment consists of allocating a regular share of your time — typically a few hours a month — to active contribution to one or more open source projects under European governance (Document Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, NLnet Labs, Codeberg, OW2, Forgejo, Framasoft, etc.) or under a neutral multi-vendor foundation (Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, CNCF, Mozilla). The contribution can take several forms: code (pull requests, bug fixes, new features), code reviews (comments on other contributors’ PRs), documentation (writing, translation, examples), bug triage (reproduction, qualification, labelling), or community work (answers on forums, mentoring of new contributors).
The commitment leaves the hourly volume and the project chosen to your discretion. A common formulation is “at least 4 hours a month”, but the threshold can be adapted to your situation (workload, career stage, ongoing project). Regularity matters more than volume: 2 hours a month over 12 months has more value to the project than an intense weekend contribution followed by silence.
The commitment stands as an individual declaration. It bears on your personal time, unless your employer explicitly authorises and encourages contribution on work time (in which case an equivalent organisational commitment can be taken at company level via pub-007-contribute-to-european-foundations).
Why this commitment matters#
Thesis 8 of the manifesto grounds this commitment at a systemic level: “technological autonomy rests less on licenses than on people: without a critical mass of paid maintainers keeping the critical bricks alive, free software becomes a technical debt funded by people other than us.” At the individual level, your contribution looks modest. At the aggregate scale of several hundred or thousand European contributors, it shifts the critical mass.
European open source projects typically suffer from a deficit of regular contributors compared with their US counterparts. Codeberg, Forgejo, NLnet, KDE, GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, OpenStreetMap, Mageia: all these projects benefit directly from each additional contributor. The concentration of maintainers on a few US projects (which can absorb a contributor’s departure or burn-out without collapsing) has no European equivalent, where each contributor counts more.
The commitment naturally reinforces the other developer commitments. When you contribute to a project, you understand it better and you can recommend it more relevantly (dev-004-recommend-european-alternatives). When you document your stack choices (dev-005-document-personal-stack-choices), your active contribution to a project gives you additional credibility in the recommendation.
A concrete example#
A senior fullstack developer employed at a French scale-up takes this commitment in June 2026, with no defined horizon. He chooses Forgejo as his main contribution project, on the basis of a double consistency: Forgejo is under European governance and Forgejo Co-op is a co-operative based in France; and he already uses Codeberg (which runs on Forgejo) for his personal projects.
He commits to a minimum of 4 hours a month. He starts with bug triage on the public tracker, which lets him discover the code gradually. After two months, he proposes his first pull request: an ergonomic improvement to a settings page he found confusing while using the tool. The PR is merged. By the sixth month, he has submitted 8 in total, of which 6 are merged, and he participates regularly in the technical discussions on Matrix. By the twelfth month, he becomes a maintainer on a peripheral module of the project.
Over the same period, his employer — without direct prompting — decides to switch part of its self-hosted code from GitLab CE to Forgejo, indirectly validating the community work. The developer publishes on his personal blog a feedback report on 12 months of contribution to Forgejo, which inspires two of his colleagues to take an equivalent commitment.
Anti-pattern to avoid#
A single contribution at the start of the commitment (opening an issue, a comment on a PR) without regular follow-through does not honour the spirit of the commitment. A contribution scattered across ten different projects, with one PR a year on each, builds no sustained relationship with a community. The value lies in regularity and gradual anchoring in one or two communities. A contribution made exclusively in “express code review” mode, without deeper engagement, may be useful to the project but remains superficial for you.
Success indicators#
You can reasonably consider this commitment fulfilled if you have sustained, over 12 consecutive months, at least a few hours of monthly contribution to one or two identified projects, if your contributions are publicly visible in the project’s tracker (PRs, issues, comments), and if you are able to discuss the project’s evolution within your professional community. Regularity over time prevails over cumulative volume.
→ Documented in the dossier#
JSON schema category: contribution. Default horizon: no defined horizon (lasting commitment). Applicable to: individual declarations only.