Prioritizing inclusion—our commitment to building healthy open source communities

Microsoft products and services run on trust, an extension of which is our commitment to building healthy open source communities. It is critically important that in our mission to empower everyone to achieve more through open source—safety, privacy, and wellbeing of our open source collaborations be at the forefront.

With this in mind, we want to announce our most recent update to our Open Source Code of Conduct. This update replaces the previous document, which was based on the now archived TODO group version, with the Contributor’s Covenant 2.0. We also made the following additions based on feedback from our open source maintainer community here at Microsoft:

• Under ‘Scope’, we added a line to include external influences on community health.
• We removed the “Enforcement Guidelines” portion of the Contributor’s Covenant, opting instead to cover enforcement steps in our FAQ. We also contributed guidance for others evaluating this section to the Contributor Covenant itself.
• We added “disruptive behavior” to the examples section for unacceptable behavior to capture the impact of repetitive negative interactions on community wellbeing.

A full list of changes to our Open Source Code of Conduct, and a related FAQ, are detailed in this GitHub pull request.

To support the success of this work, we have also rolled out training and resources for the more than 4,100 maintainers of Microsoft’s open source GitHub projects and will provide related workshops on an ongoing basis.

This work will be ongoing as we prioritize the design of diverse, inclusive, and equitable open source spaces. This includes a requirement that all projects we sponsor through the FOSS Fund also have up-to-date and enforced Codes of Conduct. To qualify for voting on the FOSS Fund, Microsoft employees must have contributed to open source during the preview two-month period, and we encourage contribution to inclusion in open source as part of that responsibility.

Learn about additional open source initiatives at Microsoft, including this recent update to our Open Source Code of Conduct.

Emma Irwin

Principal TPM, Microsoft Open Source Programs Office (OSPO)

Emma Irwin is a Principal TPM with Microsoft's Open Source Program's Office. She has over 20 years' experience building with and for open source projects and their communities. Her experience spans multiple ‘open’ ecosystems including open data, education, science, access and innovation with recognized expertise in open source engineering, sustainability, security, metrics, D&I and community building.

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