In Roadwork Ahead (page 14-17) and in Open Source Archetypes the idea of Project Archetypes is brought up. They try to broadly grip at what kinds of organizations exist within the open source space.

Archetypes, two ways

In Roadwork Ahead (page 14-17) the researchers found the following types:

• One-person Shop: Independent maintainers who are responsible for some work. (eg Curl)
• Collective: Grassroots communities. (eg Nix Project)
• Embedded: Small projects used primarily by a larger entities. (eg Tremor)
• Organization: Legal entities with a distinct brand. (eg Rust Foundation)

In Open Source Archetypes the researchers found the following types:

• Business-to-Business: Entities where being open is a core business feature, focused on working with other businesses. (eg Timber)
• Multi-Vendor Infrastructure: Large projects with multiple large stakeholders which create broad standards. (eg Kubernetes)
• Rocket Ship to Mars: Small projects with clear goals, where open source is an insurance or trust factor. (eg Signal)
• Controlled Ecosystem: Founder lead, community involved projects to support out-of-core innovation. (eg WordPress)
• Wide Open: Community governed, formalized processes and standards. (eg Rust)
• Mass Market: Similar to Wide Open, but with some insulation from a wider market of adoption. (eg Firefox)
• Specialty Library: Fundamental libaries which which are at the leading edge of research where standardization is important. (eg libssl)
• Trusted Vendor: A project with a trusted vendor, where open source is a business or development benefit to avoid lock in. (eg MongoDB)
• Upstream Dependency: Fundamental building blocks for other software. (eg OpenSSL)
• Bathwater: Vaporware. (eg heathcare.gov)