Blog Post Title
So You Want to Donate a Project? Lessons from Two Successful Open Source Donations
Blog Post Outline
A practical guide to donating a vendor-owned project to OpenTelemetry. Keeping
your roadmap, your users, and your maintainers intact along the way.
It draws on two recent donations: an eBPF-based auto-instrumentation tool (Beyla,
now OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation / OBI) and compile-time instrumentation for
Go (orchestrion and loogsuite, converging under otelc).
Both are now upstream OpenTelemetry projects with their own SIGs and contributors
from several companies.
Planned sections:
- When a project is ready to donate — reading maturity (usage, maintenance,
licensing, scope), and framing the benefit for the whole ecosystem rather than
the donor.
- Writing a donation proposal — which parts reviewers actually read: problem
statement, benefit to the community, relation to existing work, who commits to
maintaining it, and a roadmap you can keep.
- Using SIGs to align instead of compete — how overlapping instrumentation
efforts found their overlaps and gaps in a SIG and planned shared milestones.
- Going vendor-neutral without burning out the team — existing product
commitments, de-vendoring design decisions, balancing paying customers against
community work.
- What went wrong — donation timing, keeping existing SIGs and the TC in the
loop, underestimating docs and migration, and handling overlapping
implementations without splitting the ecosystem.
The goal is a clear picture of what a good donation looks like in practice:
patterns worth copying, and mistakes worth skipping.
Technologies Used
- OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI)
- OpenTelemetry Go Compile-Time Instrumentation (otelc)
Related Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
- OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation SIG (co-sponsor)
- OpenTelemetry Go Compile-Time Instrumentation SIG (co-sponsor)
- OpenTelemetry Go SIG
Sponsoring SIG
eBPF Instrumentation SIG, Go Compile-Time Instrumentation SIG
Sponsor Name
@MrAlias, @mariomac, @grcevski, @txabman42, @jpkrohling
Additional Information
Blog Post Title
So You Want to Donate a Project? Lessons from Two Successful Open Source Donations
Blog Post Outline
A practical guide to donating a vendor-owned project to OpenTelemetry. Keeping
your roadmap, your users, and your maintainers intact along the way.
It draws on two recent donations: an eBPF-based auto-instrumentation tool (Beyla,
now OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation / OBI) and compile-time instrumentation for
Go (orchestrion and loogsuite, converging under otelc).
Both are now upstream OpenTelemetry projects with their own SIGs and contributors
from several companies.
Planned sections:
licensing, scope), and framing the benefit for the whole ecosystem rather than
the donor.
statement, benefit to the community, relation to existing work, who commits to
maintaining it, and a roadmap you can keep.
efforts found their overlaps and gaps in a SIG and planned shared milestones.
commitments, de-vendoring design decisions, balancing paying customers against
community work.
loop, underestimating docs and migration, and handling overlapping
implementations without splitting the ecosystem.
The goal is a clear picture of what a good donation looks like in practice:
patterns worth copying, and mistakes worth skipping.
Technologies Used
Related Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
Sponsoring SIG
eBPF Instrumentation SIG, Go Compile-Time Instrumentation SIG
Sponsor Name
@MrAlias, @mariomac, @grcevski, @txabman42, @jpkrohling
Additional Information
into a blog post so the lessons land regardless of whether any talk is accepted.
orchestrion ([Donation Proposal]: DataDog/orchestrion - Compile-time instrumentation for golang community#2497), opentelemetry-go-auto-instrumentation ([Proposal] opentelemetry-go-auto-instrumentation community#1961, [Donation Proposal]: compile time instrumentation for golang community#2344).