Governance

Code of Conduct

Lima follows the CNCF Code of Conduct.

Maintainership

Lima is governed by Maintainers who are elected from active contributors.

As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, Lima will keep its vendor-neutrality.

Roles

Maintainers consist of two roles:

Committer (Full maintainership): Committers have full write accesses to repos under https://github.com/lima-vm. Committers’ commits should still be made via GitHub pull requests (except for urgent security fixes), and should not be pushed directly. Committers must enable 2FA for their GitHub accounts. Committers are also recognized as Maintainers in https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/project-maintainers.csv.
Reviewer (Limited maintainership): Reviewers may moderate GitHub issues and pull requests (such as adding labels and cleaning up spams), and make posts on social accounts, but they do not have any access to merge pull requests nor push commits. A Reviewer is considered as a candidate to become a Committer. Reviewers are not recognized as Maintainers in https://github.com/cncf/foundation/blob/main/project-maintainers.csv.

Access control is enforced via GitHub team membership:

All committers are members of the @lima-vm/committers team and have the Maintain role on all repos.
All reviewers are members of the @lima-vm/reviewers team and have the Triage role on all repos.
The @lima-vm/maintainers team includes both committers and reviewers, but doesn’t grant any extra access.

Current maintainers

Name	Affiliation	Role	GitHub ID (not X ID)	GPG fingerprint
Akihiro Suda	NTT	Committer	@AkihiroSuda	C020 EA87 6CE4 E06C 7AB9 5AEF 4952 4C6F 9F63 8F1A
Jan Dubois	SUSE	Committer	@jandubois	DBF6 DA01 BD81 2D63 3B77 300F A2CA E583 3B6A D416
Anders F Björklund	Individual	Committer	@afbjorklund	5981 D2E8 4E4B 9197 95B3 2174 DC05 CAD2 E73B 0C92
Balaji Vijayakumar	Thoughtworks	Committer	@balajiv113	80E1 01FE 5C89 FCF6 6171 72C8 377C 6A63 934B 8E6E
Norio Nomura	Individual	Committer	@norio-nomura	0010 36FA 2504 DBFF 37BA 2EF8 D4A7 318E B7F7 138D
Ansuman Sahoo	Individual	Committer	@unsuman	0AA6 D4D0 E084 D8B9 36B7 68D8 FF58 56B9 C216 D800
Nir Soffer	IBM	Reviewer	@nirs	6F81 B717 51A1 4171 4C09 AF19 4C67 29D7 B2DD 8AFF

Emeritus maintainers

Name	Affiliation	Role	GitHub ID (not X ID)
Oleksandr Redko	Individual	Reviewer	@alexandear

Addition and promotion of Maintainers

An active contributor to the project can be invited as a Reviewer, and can be eventually promoted to a Committer after 2 months at least.

A contributor who have made significant contributions in quality and in quantity can be also directly invited as a Committer.

A proposal to add or promote a Maintainer must be approved by 2/3 of the Committers who vote within 7 days. Voting needs 2 approvals at least. The proposer can vote too.

A proposal should happen as a GitHub pull request to the Maintainer list above. It is highly suggested to reach out to the Committers before submitting a pull request to check the will of the Committers.

Removal and demotion of Maintainers

A Maintainer who do not show significant activities for 6 months, or, who have been violating the Code of Conduct, may be demoted or removed from the project.

A proposal to demote or remove a Maintainer must be approved by 2/3 of the Committers (excluding the person in question) who vote within 14 days. Voting needs 2 approvals at least. The proposer can vote too.

A proposal may happen as a GitHub pull request, or, as a private discussion in the case of removal of a harmful Maintainer. It is highly suggested to reach out to the Committers before submitting a pull request to check the will of the Committers.

Other decisions

Any decision that is not documented here can be made by the Committers. When a dispute happens across the Committers, it will be resolved through a majority vote within the Committers. A tie should be considered as a failed vote.

Release process

Eligibility to be a release manager:

MUST be an active Committer
MUST have the GPG fingerprint listed in the maintainer list above
MUST upload the GPG public key to https://github.com/USERNAME.gpg
MUST protect the GPG key with a passphrase or a hardware token.

Release steps:

Open an issue to propose making a new release, e.g. https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/issues/2296. The proposal should be public, with an exception for vulnerability fixes. If this is the first time for you to take a role of release management, you SHOULD make a beta (or alpha, RC) release as an exercise before releasing GA.
Make sure that all the merged PRs are associated with the correct Milestone.
Run git tag --sign vX.Y.Z-beta.W .
Run git push UPSTREAM vX.Y.Z-beta.W .
Wait for the Release action on GitHub Actions to complete. A draft release will appear in https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/releases .
Download SHA256SUMS from the draft release, and confirm that it corresponds to the hashes printed in the build logs on the Release action.
Sign SHA256SUMS with gpg --detach-sign -a SHA256SUMS to produce SHA256SUMS.asc, and upload it to the draft release.
Add release notes in the draft release, to explain the changes and show appreciation to the contributors. Make sure to fulfill the Release manager: [ADD YOUR NAME HERE] (@[ADD YOUR GITHUB ID HERE]) line with your name. e.g., Release manager: Akihiro Suda (@AkihiroSuda) .
Click the Set as a pre-release checkbox if this release is a beta (or alpha, RC).
Click the Publish release button.
Close the Milestone.

Last modified September 10, 2026: MAINTAINERS: remove alexandear (5fbd7bad)