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.
The OpenChain Specification Version 1.2 is now available in Japanese. You can get it here in PDF format.
Version 1.2 is the result of the contributions of more than 150 people over the past three years. Congratulations and a big thanks to all those who contributed! Each and every contribution, whether or not it resulted in an addition, modification or debate, led to a better specification.
Huge thanks are due to the Linux Foundation Japan volunteer translation team for localizing our newest release so quickly. Special thanks is due to Taniguchi San for driving this process.
The OpenChain Japan Work Group will hold its fourth meeting at Toyota’s Midland Square offices on the 13th of June. This event builds on the recent meeting held at Panasonic’s facilities in Osaka with representatives from 15 companies in attendance, and will be a great chance to obtain practical case studies, reference material and to network.
The meeting will be held in Japanese. If you want to attend please reach out to <hiroki_takemi@mail.toyota.co.jp>.
【日時】6/13（水）13:30-16:30
【場所】トヨタ自動車名古屋オフィス（ミッドランドスクエア）
<http://www.toyota.co.jp/jpn/company/about_toyota/outline/nagoya_office.html>
【備考】
① 当日、私から入館カードをお配りしますので13：30に弊社名古屋オフィス総合受付（ミッドランドスクエア24F）に集合ください。
※ミッドランドスクエア1Fから24Fまでシャトルエレベータがございます。ご利用ください。
② Japan_WG終了後に懇親会を予定しております（会費4～5000円程度を予定）。
③ 同建物内にて弊社ショールームがございますのでご都合よろしければ是非ご観覧頂ければと存じます。
<http://www.toyota.co.jp/showroom_midlandsquare/>
OpenChain has reached several important milestones during the last month. The first is a new release of the Specification (see below) but no less important are the strides being seen in adoption, reference material contributions, case studies and local work teams or workshops. It provides a strong start to our quarter with thanks, as always, due to our vibrant community.
OpenChain Specification
The OpenChain Specification version 1.2 was released on the 19th of April at the Legal and Licensing Workshop in Barcelona. This document presents a refined, easier to understand and easier to translate format. Our goal is to open our community to wider participation and adoption.
Specification version 1.2 is the result of contributions of more than 150 people over the past three years. Congratulations and a big thanks to all those who contributed! Each and every contribution, whether or not it resulted in an addition, modification or debate, led to a better specification.
The OpenChain Project is delighted to welcome NodeWeaver as the latest organization with an OpenChain conformant program. NodeWeaver is a zero-management hyperconverged infrastructure – that integrates storage, networking and virtualization in a single system. It is built using the same principles of large scale systems used by Google and Amazon, making them available to small and medium enterprises.
Great feedback was provided on their experience with our project: “With more than 80% of our code being open source, Open Source license compliance is an essential aspect for us” says Carlo Daffara, NodeWeaver’s CEO. “OpenChain helped us in making the process streamlined, repeatable and consistent, and substantially lowered our compliance cost while increasing visibility into all aspect of our production process.”
But there is more! As mentioned in our last newsletter, we have been working with the British National Health Service and their partners on both conformance and case studies. We are honored to be able to formally announce the first fruits of this collaboration.
We have welcomed AB EHR as an organization with an OpenChain Conformant program, an important step towards practical adoption by NHS providers charged with running technical projects, in this case the Code4Health initiative.
Martin of Source Code Control, the key liaison in this collaboration provided a quote to summarise the value seen: “We have been supporting Code4Health for a number of years to manage their open source supply chain. The OpenChain Specification has enabled us to validate the processes meet industry best practice and that the solutions being promoted to NHS are best of breed and this can be transparently demonstrated.” Martin Callinan, Director Source Code Control Ltd.
The OpenChain Project is delighted to announce the release of our first case study, a collaboration with NHS England, NHS Digital and AB EHR. This case study offers an insight into how and why the British National Health Service has decided to use the OpenChain Specification as a baseline for effective compliance across its digital projects.
Our first case study is centered around adoption by the service provider AB EHR for the code4health project. This marks the first step in a broader deployment plan across multiple projects and providers in the coming months and years.
Internationalization efforts are being prepared to translate the new OpenChain Specification into our key target languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean and German). Activity is also underway to provide outcomes from the Japan Work Group sessions to the wider community. Of particular note are several case studies from companies like Panasonic to discuss their experiences and reasons for engagement.
Coming next
You can expect additional announcements regarding conformant organizations, reference materials and translations in the coming month. The process for developing the OpenChain Specification 1.3 will also get underway. All contributions, suggestions and comments are always welcome.
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.
The third meeting of the OpenChain Japan Work Group took place at the Panasonic headquarters in Osaka. This event was attended by around 30 people representing 15 organizations. Topics on the agenda included real world application of the specification to solve supply chain challenges and the collection of case studies from a diverse range of Japanese stakeholders.
The outcomes of the event will be shared in more detail in the coming weeks. As with all Japan Work Group meetings, this event was held in Japanese, and kindly self-organized by our excellent local community.
The OpenChain Project is excited to announce the availability of the OpenChain Specification version 1.2. This document presents a refined, easier to understand and easier to translate format. Our goal is to open our community to wider participation and adoption.
The following African proverb captures the essence of the OpenChain community effort:
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Version 1.2 is the result of the contributions of more than 150 people over the past three years. Congratulations and a big thanks to all those who contributed! Each and every contribution, whether or not it resulted in an addition, modification or debate, led to a better specification.
The OpenChain Project is delighted to welcome NodeWeaver as our latest organization with an OpenChain conformant program.
NodeWeaver is a zero-management hyperconverged infrastructure – that integrates storage, networking and virtualization in a single system. It is built using the same principles of large scale systems used by Google and Amazon, making them available to small and medium enterprises.
“With more than 80% of our code being open source, Open Source license compliance is an essential aspect for us” says Carlo Daffara, NodeWeaver’s CEO. “OpenChain helped us in making the process streamlined, repeatable and consistent, and substantially lowered our compliance cost while increasing visibility into all aspect of our production process.”
“The European sphere is vitally important for open source software,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain Project Direction. “It is a market with frequent explicit requests for open source throughout procurement and it contains an extremely vital community of small to medium enterprises. We are delighted to welcome NodeWeaver to our list of OpenChain Conformant organizations. This is both because of their long-history in open source and their unique position to support and influence many more companies across the continent.”
The OpenChain Project is delighted to welcome AB EHR as an organization with an OpenChain Conformant program. Their participation is especially valued as it ties into collaboration with NHS England, NHS Digital and other key stakeholders involved with open source in the British National Health System.
“We have been supporting Code4Health for a number of years to manage their open source supply chain. The OpenChain Specification has enabled us to validate the processes meet industry best practice and that the solutions being promoted to NHS are best of breed and this can be transparently demonstrated.” Martin Callinan, Director Source Code Control Ltd.
AB EHR’s participation is also the subject of our first case study. You can learn more about it here and you can also download the full case study in PDF format here.
“This is another important step to bring yet further assurance to the health and care system by evidencing good governance and best practice in the development and use of opensource solutions,” says Peter Coates, Head of Ecosystem Development, and leader of NHS Digital’s support of Code4Health.
“Community is at the heart of OpenChain as a project,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain Project Director. “This goes beyond the narrow confines of one industry segment or one market approach. It is about every entity that makes, uses or supports open source software. We are delighted to demonstrate this broad applicability in close partnership with organizations like AB EHR and Source Code Control.”
The OpenChain community of conformant organizations is growing across a wide range of stakeholders from all corners of software creation and use. You can follow the progress of our conformance program here and you can participate in our community here. Everyone, from organizations of all types, is very welcome.
The OpenChain Project is delighted to announce the release of our first case study, a collaboration with NHS England, NHS Digital and AB EHR. This case study offers an insight into how and why the British National Health Service has decided to use the OpenChain Specification as a baseline for effective compliance across its digital projects.
Our first case study is centered around adoption by the service provider AB EHR for the code4health project. This marks the first step in a broader deployment plan across multiple projects and providers in the coming months and years.
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.”
