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Shane Coughlan is an expert in communication, security and business development. His professional accomplishments include spearheading the licensing team that elevated Open Invention Network into the largest patent non-aggression community in history, establishing the leading professional network of Open Source legal experts and aligning stakeholders to launch both the first law journal and the first law book dedicated to Open Source. Shane has extensive knowledge of Open Source governance, internal process development, supply chain management and community building. His experience includes engagement with the enterprise, embedded, mobile and automotive industries.
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On the 17th of September, the 6th Bitkom Forum Open Source Software will take place in Erfurt, Germany. About 150 participants from 100 companies are expected.
The OpenChain Project will have a booth at the event hosted by a wide collection of our German partners. Please feel free to visit, learn more about the project in the region, and learn more about the organizations offering community support and professional services in this space.
This is an exciting event for OpenChain for two reasons. The first is that we have been invited to participate by Holger Koch from Deutsche Bahn, a great example of the community working to grow the community, and the second is that our various OpenChain partners quickly, efficiently and cheerfully coordinated to ensure there will be a friendly face at our booth all day.
More Information About The Event
Video minutes are now available for the first OpenChain Automotive Work Group Meeting on the 19th of July 2019. This meeting, bringing together collaborators from dozens of companies across three continents, marked the beginning of a global effort to seek common, resource effective solutions for open source license compliance.
The regularly scheduled OpenChain First Second Monday call will take place today at 09:00 Pacific / 18:00 CET. This call was moved forward one week due to a US holiday.
We will be having Mark Gisi introduce the SParts Project as a featured guest, then a presentation by Philippe Ombredanne on ScanCode before moving our focus to the OpenChain ISO Spec.
Join the call: https://uberconference.com/openchainproject
Today is a remarkable day. The OpenChain India Work Group has just begun its first meeting thanks to Mishi, Chandana and so many other people from so many companies. As Shane Coughlan mention’s in his opening speech linked below, this is part of an exceptional month for the OpenChain Project, as we start work groups here and in China. The standard for open source compliance is reaching out to an additional 2.8 billion people. Great things lie ahead.





Video of the Opening Speech
PLEASE NOTE: We had an issue with the Internet connection between Japan and India, resulting in distorted sound on this video, however we believe the video is of value as a marker of the event and thus not revising it from the original. Please find below an excerpt of the speech outlining the key points covered.
“First of all I would like to say thank to the hosts. This is the first time we have managed to have a work group meeting in India, which is vitally important for the future of the project, and indeed this month is probably the most important we have had in community outreach.
We have having our first work group in India, our first work group in China, and continuing our outreach in Taiwan. The project has been so lucky to build out an international community and this year in particular we have been reaching the billions of people who are vital for the future of open source.
Now, when it comes to what you are doing today and what you will do tomorrow, hopefully you will build bridges between companies like Infosys that are OpenChain conformant and companies like WIPRO that are not yet. I want to bring the connection to the international market. One thing that has got me very excited is that in China we will have a lot of the companies deeply connected to India at our first work group. For example, Xiaomi, which has just announced its 100th million smartphone sold in the Indian subcontinent.
Right now in OpenChain we are getting ready to become an ISO standard. We have seen a lot of support from user companies and also from providers. For example, our community of conformance is set to double this year. Our activities in Japan alone involve 68 companies and 150 people. Our new automotive work group has over 100 people involved.
[…]The international OpenChain community is here to support you every step of the way.”
The first OpenChain India Work Group meeting took place on September 5th in Bangalore. This event was kindly hosted by SFLC.in and MCA. We welcome contributors from OpenChain Conformant companies such as Cognizant and Infosys along with many good friends from other Indian entities.


The event included case studies as well as open discussion. You can check out the InfoSys case study on OpenChain Conformance below.
The OpenChain India Work Group will announce future meetings shortly. Watch this space!
The OpenChain Project is delighted to announce the immediate availability of the OpenChain Specification 2.0 in Korean. This process was lead by Haksung Jang. Many thanks to Jongbaek Park, Seo-young Isabelle Hwang and Jong-ho Hong for their contributions.
Get these guides and many more documents in the OpenChain Reference Library.
The OpenChain Korea Work Group held its 3rd meeting at the SK Telecom offices in Seoul. As usual we had a mix of people from consumer electronics, automotive and telecommunication companies present.


Review the Keynote Slides
The OpenChain Project is delighted to announce the launch of a series of interviews about the people behind our work. While open source is mostly about software, and governance is mostly about licenses, it is also the story of thousands of individuals collaborating. We hope these interviews with inform and inspire our readers, and encourage more people to participate in open source and OpenChain.
Kayoko Takanishi from TUV SUD has kindly agreed to be our first featured community figure.
Read Our First Interview Now
The latest draft of the next version of OpenChain Specification can be found here:
Our objective is to make only minor clarification changes over version 2.0 while we wait for ISO adoption (currently in progress). We discussed a half dozen items posted on the specification issue list at the Open Source Summit, North American F2F OpenChain meeting.
Get this guide and many more documents in the OpenChain Reference Library.
After discussing the various open issues we decided to make only one minor change:
Because the terms “Software Staff” and “Program Participants” where used interchangeable in the spec, it was decided to replace each use of “Software Staff” with “Program Participants” which is more consistent with ISO terminology.
Coming Next
We will continue to accept feedback for ISO version 2.1 up through October 31st 2019. We will have one more F2F meeting at the Open Source Summit, Europe in October. We will finalize the ISO 2.1 version in November 2019. We will then embark on the next major revision of the specification starting December 1st 2019.
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