Shane Coughlan

Today PwC Germany (https://www.pwc.de/opensource) announces support for OpenChain Conformance activities in companies across all sectors.

The OpenChain Project provides robust Self-Certification to showcase compliance with OpenChain Specification, the industry standard for open source compliance. However, Self-Certification may not always be optimal for organizations with limited experience in open source or those needing to minimize the potential for conflicts of interest via reports from an independent external auditor.
PwC and other auditing organizations are working to acknowledge these market requirements and to build further trust in OpenChain Conformance through two approaches:

• PwC supports organizations, providing operational excellence, guidance and reviews setting up required processes, guidelines and policies for an OpenChain Conformance program. 

• PwC audits organizations’ OpenChain Conformance program as an external independent auditor and reports against the OpenChain Specification in a formal international reporting format and attestation. This provides trust in OSS management especially in the supply chain. 

Through integration of third-party assessors and advisory firms in the OpenChain community, a platform is created to further enable the industry-wide acceptance of the OpenChain standard which is very valuable especially for supply chains.

SAN FRANCISCO, October 10, 2019 – HH Partners, a law firm based in Finland, today announces participation in the OpenChain Project. HH Partners intends to support adoption of the OpenChain industry standard for open source compliance both inside Finland and across the broader global market. HH Partners will be contributing to the OpenChain project both via its open technology practice and via its own open source compliance research project, Double Open.

The OpenChain Project establishes trust in the open source from which software solutions are built. It accomplishes this by making open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. The OpenChain Specification defines inflection points in business workflows where a compliance process, policy or training should exist to minimize the potential for errors and maximize the efficiency of bringing solutions to market. The companies involved in the OpenChain community number in the hundreds. The OpenChain Specification is being prepared for submission to ISO and evolution from a growing de facto standard into a formal standard.

“Open source compliance in the supply chain is a challenge to all companies. The OpenChain Project has already achieved and demonstrated a simpler way for organizations to learn and progress in open source compliance. Standardization is a way of unifying expectations, and therefore it simplifies processes. We are excited to leverage our network in Finland to further our joint goals with OpenChain and help organizations achieve better open source compliance” says Martin von Willebrand, Partner and Head of Open Technology at HH Partners, Attorneys-at-law Ltd.

“The key to a successful community is to build great relationships,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “Establishing a formal relationship with HH Partners underlines our pre-existing and fruitful collaboration over many years. Martin and his team have long been a lynchpin of open source legal knowledge in North Europe, and their engagement today is a reflection of how the project and its associated industry standard is gaining momentum.”

About HH Partners

HH Partners, Attorneys-at-law, Ltd, is a Helsinki, Finland based law firm focusing on Technology, Intellectual Property Rights and Transactions. Its Open Technology practice is likely the largest law firm practice on open technologies in Finland.

The link for HH Partners’ English website can be found here:

• https://www.hhpartners.fi/en/

Learn more about the Double Open Project

Double Open is research project of HH Partners, as a part of 4API project in collaboration with the University of Helsinki and several other companies. Double Open aims to enable open open source compliance automation, leveraging existing open tools and open data. The project is partially funded by Business Finland.

• https://www.doubleopen.org/

About the OpenChain Project

The OpenChain Project builds trust in open source by making open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. The OpenChain Specification defines a core set of requirements every quality compliance program must satisfy. The OpenChain Curriculum provides the educational foundation for open source processes and solutions, whilst meeting a key requirement of the OpenChain Specification. OpenChain Conformance allows organizations to display their adherence to these requirements. The result is that open source license compliance becomes more predictable, understandable and efficient for participants of the software supply chain.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. 

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contacts

Shane Coughlan
+818040358083
coughlan@linux.com

Martin von Willebrand
+3589177613
martin.vonwillebrand@hhpartners.fi

Dr. Peter Ellsiepen at the European Space Agency (ESA) is kindly hosting a Tooling Work Group meeting at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC). This event marks one of the early opportunities for parties interested in tooling and automation to get together and discuss which open source solutions they are applying to open source compliance.

The Tooling Work Group is chaired by Oliver Fendt from Siemens and has a diverse range of contributors from German, Japanese and international companies.

Learn More About the Tooling Work Group

• https://github.com/Open-Source-Compliance/Sharing-creates-value

Join the Mailing List

https://groups.io/g/oss-based-compliance-tooling

The minutes are below. The slides discussed during the meeting are also below for reference.

1. News

Oliver gave an overview about “what happened since last meeting”
Two new user stories are available in the Github repo:
             Initial user story – Software-Developer-Epic.md https://github.com/Open-Source-Compliance/Sharing-creates-value/blob/master/User-Stories/Software-Developer-User-Stories/Software-Developer-Epic.md
             Initial user story – Compliance-Assistant-Epic.md https://github.com/Open-Source-Compliance/Sharing-creates-value/blob/master/User-Stories/Compliance-Assistant-User-Stories/Compliance-Assistant-Epic.md

A new version of the one pager slide was circulated on the mailing list. The objective is to have the first release next week.

Upcoming Events:
             Oliver presented an overview of the interesting session from an OSS compliance perspective at Eclipsecon.
             Alexios asked about an overview of the interesting sessions at OSS Summit Europe. Michael J. sent an email with interesting talks at the OSS Summit Europe to the mailing list.

2. Sw360antenna
Lars gave an overview about their work concerning automation and integration of the OSS compliance tools in the CI/CD workflow. He introduced two use cases (please see attached slides):
1. Automatic management of 3rd party dependencies
             This use case applies to “normal” software development, where the OSS component approval is triggered by the integration of the component.
2. Upfront dependency approval
             This use case applies to software development in regulated environments like safety critical systems, where the OSS components which will be integrated must be known upfront. If an unknown component is detected this will cause a policy violation.
             Aaron added that this use case is also common in the financial sector.

Lars mentioned that for having an overview about the licensing situation scancode is used and for the curation, approval and release FOSSology is used.
He gave a nice live demo showing the working implementation of use case 1. Oliver mentioned that this demo covers the following functional blocks of the big picture:
             Dependency resolver
             Source package downloader
             License & Copyright Scanner
             Policy Checker
             Component & application inventory
             FOSS Compliance Bundle generator

The documentation of use case 1 is available on https://eclipse.github.io/antenna/1.0.0-SNAPSHOT

3. Next Steps
             User stories:
                            Kate mentioned that there is no user story covering the recipients of the compliance artifacts – the persons/organizations receiving the results of the process and results produced by the toolchain. Oliver said that such a user story will be added.

             Next meeting:
                            The next regular Wednesday meeting will be on 6th of Nov. On 10th of Oct there is the face to face meeting in Darmstadt

Does your company do open source? It is time to get involved with The Linux Foundation‘s OpenChain Project, the industry standard to make open source compliance quick, easy and efficient. Meet us at Open Source Summit Europe, hop on a call or join our mailing lists. All welcome!

Become Part of What We Do

• https://www.openchainproject.org/get-started/participate

The OpenChain Project will be taking center stage during the Risk and Compliance in Open Source panel at the Nordic OpenInfra Days on the 3rd of October.

“Amanda Brock will chair the panel and consider what is risk in open source and what does it take to make software Trustable from a legal and compliance perspective. The Linux Foundation’s OpenChain compliance project has rapidly gained traction and is supported by companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Intel, Toyota and Scania. Andrew Katz from Orcro, a Linux Foundation partner, has been advising companies on open source compliance for many years, and draws on the practical experience he has with clients large and small in discussing this. Martin Von Willebrand will consider how to implement an end-to-end automated open source compliance tool chain and Professor Björn Lundell will highlight findings and challenges from extensive research related to clarifying terms (and obtaining patent licences) for use of IT standards allowing for implementation in open source projects.”

Learn More

• https://openinfranordics.com/program/

The minutes are below. The slides discussed during the meeting are presented here as well for reference.

1. Update on the agenda
There will be no sw360antenna presentation in this meeting. The presentation will be done in the next meeting

2. News
Oliver gave an overview about “what happened since last meeting”

3. Reference slides
Comments made by Frances are incorporated. Alexios proposed to add a note in the lower left box explaining that this is an example picture -> headline added. Peter suggested to add the mailing list subscription page and to improve the layout of the lower right box. -> done. Alexios proposed to be more explicit that there is world-wide collaboration and a world wide availability (upper right box) –> done. World map was updated
The glossary and the component landscape will be aligned with the big picture functional blocks –> cross check done – big picture partly updated, issue planned regarding glossary

3. User Stories
Overview of the Software-Architect-Epic.md. – Oliver explained that this epic should be seen as an abstract description that shall serve as a base for more detailed user stories. Marcel and Peter will check what user stories they can contribute

The OpenChain Project, in conjunction with the Taiwanese Legal Network and the Open Culture Foundation, held our second open source compliance workshop in Taipei on the 27th of September.

This event provided an opportunity to build on previous relationships to further our mission to ensure everyone is aware of and understands how to engage with our industry standard for open source compliance. This event was kindly sponsored by MOXA, a company that has been a positive contributor to our project throughout 2019.

As usual we are making the slides from this event available. We kicked off with a general overview of the OpenChain Project by Shane Coughlan, General Manager.

The event included an overview of why the OpenChain Japan Work Group formed and how it works.

Ueda San from Sony provided an excellent presentation on how Sony manages open source and compliance.

Kato San from Panasonic explained how his company contextualizes open source and compliance activities.

The event was capped by the excellent presentation by SZ Lin of MOXA explaining their perspective and activities in Taiwan and globally.

We ended the event with consensus that it is time to begin exploring the launch of a formal OpenChain Taiwan Work Group. Watch this space!