Prosocial free software

For a piece of free software to benefit society, we tend to hope it fulfils the following.

• bazaar-developed, not cathedral
• either a high bus factor, or simple enough that bus factor isn't a concern
  • in other words: if a codebase has only one developer, others must be able and willing to take over when this person developer gets hit by a bus – the more lines of code, the more important they're well-written
  • if the codebase is very big, many people should be involved in it: that's called a high bus factor
• Well-written, which eases auditing and forking

By contrast, these features are not prosocial

• cathedral-developed
• "open core"
• SaaS

Related

• Computer science