Reducing the Bus Factor: A Safer Path for Axmol’s Growth

[paulocoutinhox]

Ensuring Long-Term Stability and Confidence for the Axmol Project

One of the key factors that makes open-source projects thrive is trust. Developers, companies, and contributors want to feel confident that the technology they are adopting will continue to be supported and evolve in the long term.

At the moment, Axmol has an amazing community and strong maintainers (special thanks to @halx99 for all the dedication). However, the project still faces what is often called the “bus factor” — meaning, if the main maintainer or a key person can no longer continue (due to personal reasons, unexpected events, or simply stepping away), the project could face difficulties.

To mitigate this risk and make Axmol even more attractive for adoption, I’d like to suggest considering a governance model with shared leadership. Some examples from other engines and projects:

• Defold created a foundation to guarantee the project’s future, independent of any single person.
• Many popular open-source projects (e.g., Godot, Blender, LLVM) have organizations or foundations managing the governance, ensuring continuity.

For Axmol, this could mean:

• Creating an Axmol Organization (or even a lightweight foundation) that officially owns the repository.
• Having multiple maintainers with commit rights, so responsibilities are shared.
• Setting clear rules for decision-making and leadership rotation if needed.
• Ensuring there are always at least 2–3 trusted maintainers who can step in when necessary.

The benefits of such a structure:

• Trust and Adoption → Developers and companies will be more confident to invest time, resources, and even money in Axmol if they know the project is safe in the long run.
• Community Growth → More contributors can step up as official maintainers, reducing bottlenecks and speeding up development.
• Resilience → The project becomes less dependent on one person’s availability, making it stronger and more sustainable.

This isn’t about expecting something bad to happen — it’s about planning for the future and making Axmol stronger as a community-driven project.

I’d love to hear what others think about this idea. Would it make sense to start discussing possible structures (e.g., an Axmol Foundation or at least an official multi-maintainer governance model)?

Thanks.