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.
During the Legal and Licensing Workshop in Barcelona on the 18th of April there was a workshop with a focus on useful templates for open source compliance activities. One of the templates most commonly requested is related to case studies. After discussion among two teams and a total of fourteen people we produced a simple template for one page case studies:
This template – as with all templates and curriculum material – is licensed under CC-0 for use without restriction.
OpenChain has been featured in the latest issue of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review. This publication is the first law journal dedicated to open source and is now in its ninth year of ongoing release.
The article is entitled ‘The Bid by OpenChain to Transform The Supply Chain’ and the abstract is below. At the end of this post you will find a link to the full article.
“OpenChain aims to increase open source compliance in the supply chain. This issue, which many initially dismiss as a legal concern or as low priority, is inherently tied to ensuring that open source is as useful as possible with as little friction as possible. In a nutshell, because open source is about the use of third party code, compliance is the nexus of where equality of access, safety of use and reduction of risk can be found. OpenChain is built to increase trust between organizations to accomplish this.”
The OpenChain Project was featured in a workshop and a keynote speech at the recent Legal and Licensing Workshop in Barcelona. This event, hosted by the Legal Network, provides an annual forum for open source counsel and related experts to share knowledge and news.
This year the focus was on practical outcomes and the OpenChain workshop was no exception. The core goal was to provide a template for future case studies and to encourage our first submissions. Today you can see the template. The case studies will be along shortly.
In other news, during the event OpenChain received contributions of kanban templates, checklist templates and onboarding slides. Watch this space for social media releases in the near future.
The OpenChain Project in collaboration with Open Invention Network hosted a get-together in Korea. This was a small event centered around a meal in the city center. Our goal was to reach out to old friends at LG Electronics and to make new friends from LG Display. One of the primary outcomes was the decision to hold a full OpenChain workshop in the next three months. Haksung from the LG Electronics open source team kindly offered to assist with our planning regarding attendees and ideal timing.
The Software Compliance Academy (one of the OpenChain Pilot Partner Program participants) ran a workshop in Germany on the 9th of April to discuss compliance. Naturally OpenChain was featured high on the list regarding approaches to frame effective, efficient compliance management.
More information in German:
“Die Verwendung von Free and Open Source Software wirft eine Reihe von rechtlichen Fragestellungen auf. Welche Vorteile bietet das Open Source Lizenzmodell? Und welche Lizenzpflichten sind dabei zu beachten? Einen vertieften Einblick in die unterschiedlichen Open Source Lizenzen und insbesondere die jeweils zu beachtenden Lizenzpflichten sowie damit einhergehende Kompatibilitätsfragen gibt das gemeinsam mit Vogel Business Media ausgerichtete FOSS Compliance Seminar in Würzburg am 9. April 2018.”
The OpenChain Project was featured at the first Asian Legal Network meeting of 2018 in Tokyo on the 6th of April. This event provided an opportunity to unpack the latest news around compliance with an audience from over 10 companies. The event was sponsored by Open Invention Network and marked another chapter in the on-going collaboration between various international non-profit organizations and projects to support the growth and sustainability of open source.
This month is all about the OpenChain Specification. We are approaching a new release and are seizing the opportunity for reaffirming the core text and goals of the project. At the same time we are seeing new interest and engagement from both technology stakeholders and those from further afield. Speaking of further afield, we just released some milestone curriculum material in Simplified Chinese under CC-0 licensing (effectively public domain). See below.
OpenChain Specification
The OpenChain Project has developed a specification that defines a core set of requirements that a quality FOSS compliance program is expected to satisfy. Although it represents a minimum set of “must have” requirements, a significant degree of flexibility is given on how an organization might implement them. OpenChain Conformance helps to reduce concerns about open source compliance in organizations of all types and sizes.
We update the specification periodically based on feedback from our community. At the moment we are in the home stretch before releasing version 1.2 in April. This release does not change the requirements of the specification but introduces improvements to language and definitions to make OpenChain Conformance and translations easier. We are seeking public comments as we wrap things up.
We welcome any and all feedback from all parties. The easiest way to provide such feedback and to get involved in the conversation is to mail our Specification list: Openchain-specification@lists.linuxfoundation.org
There are several large entities currently undergoing OpenChain Conformance. We are working closely with these new and old community partners to assist and to learn. OpenChain Conformance is often a two-way process, involving listening to great feedback that helps us improve the OpenChain Specification or the OpenChain Conformance process itself.
One of the first announcements coming up, and our first case study, is being arranged with Code4Health, a project of the English National Health Service and National Health Service Digital. We expect to formally release the case study and announce their conformance by the end of this month. Meanwhile, Code4Health – the first program inside the NHS to conform – is already Tweeting:
OpenChain @ Events
We have completed some interesting event outreach during the early part of March. One of the most notable was a workshop held in partnership with the Open Culture Foundation (Taiwan) on the 5th of March, an event that fits neatly into our Asian outreach priorities. A few points became clear:
Most attendees had a direct interest in using some or all of the OpenChain curriculum to support their compliance efforts.
All attendees expressed interest having open source compliance collaboration between companies to encourage deeper open source use in companies.
Most attendees faced various challenges in explaining this to the administrative side of their businesses.
One area of useful feedback was that some attendees asked for future events to be held in Hsichu or Neihu so that their colleagues can join. Some may be able to offer a meeting room at their offices. Our colleagues at the Open Culture Foundation are exploring the opportunities and may hold another workshop in April or May.
OpenChain Project held a governing board meeting, a face-t0-face and a standing room-only talk at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Leadership Summit in Sonoma. This event was a great chance to reconnect with many of our core constituents and to personally engage with some potential new contributors.
For those of you who are new to the project, our governing board consists of representatives from our 14 Platinum Members, and it meets once every quarter to discuss strategy. Their input ties directly into the activities of our Specification, Conformance, Curriculum and Onboarding work teams, each of which was represented or discussed during our open session. The OpenChain talk was delivered by Shane Coughlan, OpenChain Project Director, to the general Leadership Summit audience. It was interesting to note the level of engagement and questions fielded by the audience. It highlights both the amount of interest there is around improving compliance and areas where we can usefully focus on developing new onboarding or reference material.
The OpenChain Project has some forthcoming events that may be of interest to our readers:
The OpenChain Curriculum slides are now available in Simplified Chinese. This is a significant milestone in sharing useful open source compliance information with a key target demographic. Great thanks are due to Hung Chang and Navia Shen for initiating the OpenChain Simplified Chinese translator team, to Lucien Lin for creating this translation, and to Florence Ko for review.
The next month will be all about case studies, reference material and expanding the community of conformance. Not to mention the formal release of the OpenChain Specification 1.2. Stay tuned and feel free to join any of our work teams at any time. You insights always help make us better.
License and Trademarks
Copyright 2018 The Linux Foundation. This newsletter is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0). Please feel free to share it onwards! OpenChain is a trademark of The Linux Foundation. It may be used according to The Linux Foundation Trademark Policy and the OpenChain Terms of Use. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Software Compliance Academy highlighted the OpenChain Project, curriculum, training and specification at an event hosted on the 22nd March by ZVEI. This event marks the first major workshop featuring OpenChain in Germany.
The ZVEI is one of the most important manufacturers’ associations in Germany. It is the regulatory and economic policy authority of the electrical and electronics industry and actively contribute to the further development of the economic and socio-political framework in Germany and Europe.
The Software Compliance Academy offers individually tailored in-house training programs as well as external seminars covering most recent software compliance trends and topics. It is one of the first OpenChain Pilot Partner Program participants and personnel from the organization have been involved with the OpenChain Project since its inception.
The first two months of 2018 have been focused on building outreach in the China, Japan and Korea (CJK) region. We have established friendships and reached agreements to help spread the OpenChain Curriculum and broader OpenChain material to a wider audience. As part of this our localization efforts have continued at a rapid pace.
But that’s not all! OpenChain Project volunteers have been extremely busy prepare the version 1.2 update for the OpenChain Specification, we have seen background work to improve our free online conformance service, and our onboarding work team has entered a revision period for key documentation.
This draft will be finalized at the OpenChain Face-to-Face at the Open Source Leadership Summit in March (see below) and is expected to be released in April. While it contains no new requirements and represents a minor change to the specification, this revision offers substantially improved clarity and ease of translation.
OpenChain Onboarding
The Onboarding team is looking for final feedback or edits for two documents as we prepare to share material at the Open Source Leadership Summit:
The OpenChain Conformance Web App has obtained various improvements to version control and – more recently – taken the first steps towards internationalization. Our goal is to release the web app in multiple languages from Q2 onwards.
OpenChain @ Events
The OpenChain Project has been fleshing out our 2018 event calendar with a series of announcements:
We have also been in the fortunate position of being able to outline further details of expected future activities in Taiwan and Mainland China. While some details are subject to change the key take-away is that we are seeing healthy progress towards deeper engagement in a key market area.
To support our recent expansion of workshops in the Far East we have had a strong of excellent announcements regarding localization resources.
The OpenChain Curriculum, a slide deck that covers everything from “what is a license” through to open source developer guides, has been released in Traditional Chinese. This excellent development owes much thanks to Lucien Lin and Florence Ko of the Open Culture Foundation (Taiwan).
An additional output of this process has be a published draft for the Simplified Chinese translation of the same material. This draft provides a foundation for our volunteers to work towards a complete release in the near future.
In the next month you can expect announcements regarding the Specification version 1.2, new onboarding material, and feedback regarding our Curriculum. Moving into Q2 you can expect increased internationalization, further engagement in North America and Europe, and case studies or reference material to support adoption.
License and Trademarks
Copyright 2018 The Linux Foundation. This newsletter is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0). Please feel free to share it onwards! OpenChain is a trademark of The Linux Foundation. It may be used according to The Linux Foundation Trademark Policy and the OpenChain Terms of Use. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Latest OpenChain Curriculum Draft in Simplified Chinese
San Francisco, United States, February 19, 2017 — The OpenChain Project is delighted to announce the draft OpenChain Curriculum in Simplified Chinese for Specification 1.1. This proposal draft is intended to help support our Simplified Chinese translation team. While it is not finalized yet, the document is based on the completed translation in Traditional Chinese, and it is intended reduce the amount of work required to reach a formal release.
As with all OpenChain Curriculum material, these documents are made available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC-0) license, and anyone can use, study, share and improve the work as they see fit.
Great thanks are due to Lucien Lin and Florence Ko for helping to build bridges in the CJK region that are so important to our long-term success. Our strategic goal is to engage open source users in the CJK area (China, Japan, Korea) and localization plays a central role in this process.
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The OpenChain Project identifies key recommended processes for effective open source management. The 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.
The OpenChain Project in collaboration with Open Invention Network hosted a get-together in Korea. This was a small event centered around a meal in the city center. Our goal was to reach out to old friends at LG Electronics and to make new friends from LG Display. One of the primary outcomes was the decision to hold a full OpenChain workshop in the next three months. Haksung from the LG Electronics open source team kindly offered to assist with our planning regarding attendees and ideal timing.
