Governance

This page describes how Prisma 8 is governed today. It is deliberately descriptive of the current reality rather than aspirational — projects with one team and a small contributor base do not benefit from formal governance theatre. Expect this to evolve as the contributor base grows; that evolution will be written down here when it happens.

Maintainer team

Prisma 8 is maintained by @prisma/ORM-TS-Maintain — a single GitHub team that owns the entire codebase via a flat CODEOWNERS rule. Subsystem-level ownership rules may be introduced later as the team grows; for now, one team owns everything.

Membership in the maintainer team is at Prisma's discretion. There is no documented progression path from external contributor to maintainer at this time.

Decision-making

Decisions are reached by maintainer consensus on the relevant PR or issue thread. There is no formal "lazy consensus" 72-hour silence-equals-assent rule — concretely, a maintainer reviews and approves, and that's the merge signal. CODEOWNERS enforces that at least one approving review from the maintainer team is required to merge to main.

Architectural decisions — anything that changes the system's design, public surface, or cross-cutting behaviour — are recorded as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) under docs/architecture docs/adrs/. ADRs are append-only and serve as the durable record of why something was done. If a decision is contentious, large, or affects how external consumers will use Prisma 8, write an ADR; if a decision is small and local, a PR description is sufficient.

Contributor provenance

Prisma 8 uses the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) 1.1, not a Contributor License Agreement. Every commit on a PR must include a Signed-off-by: trailer matching the commit author. The full mechanics are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

DCO was chosen over CLA because it is the lightweight standard used by Linux, Kubernetes, and a large fraction of the modern OSS ecosystem; it lowers contribution friction without giving up the legal grounding we need.

License

Prisma 8 is licensed under Apache-2.0. All publishable workspace packages declare "license": "Apache-2.0" in their package.json; this is enforced in CI. See supply-chain.md for the validation details and the Apache-2.0 §4(d) NOTICE-propagation audit.

Release-candidate status

Prisma 8 ships as a release candidate ahead of 8.0.0 final. The practical implications for contributors and consumers are described in CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md.

Code of Conduct

Participation is governed by the Code of Conduct. Reporting channels are documented there.