The OpenChain Project had a substantial presence at Open Source Summit North America 2025. We are posting some of our key talks to here to help with community education and discussion.
In From the Cold: Open Source as Part of Mainstream Software Asset Management:
Software Asset Management (SAM) provides a way to manage software across small, medium and large entities. It is often seen as a way of addressing licensing or for making sure company staff are using permitted software applications and versions.
Open source has traditionally been divorced from SAM, which was focused on proprietary software solutions. Partly this was due to practical matters like different licensing schemes, and partly it was an artifact of separate paths of evolution.
However, in recent years open source has increasingly adopted approaches to licensing, security and other challenges that mirror SAM. Examples include the use of standards like ISO/IEC 5230 for licensing and ISO/IEC 18974 for security, of implementation standards like ISO/IEC 5962 for Software Bill of Materials.
As a consequence, open source is now more closely aligned with SAM. This talk will examine what that means for open source management overhead today, and where it will take us in the future. This talk is intended to equip people in open source strategy, legal and team leadership to navigate changes as smoothly as possible.
Slides:
Speakers:
- Shane Coughlan, General Manager of the OpenChain Project
