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 Software Compliance Academy will host a FOSS Compliance Seminar on June 14th to 15th in Berlin. This seminar will feature the OpenChain Specification and reference material, providing a great starting point for organizations in Germany, Switzerland or Austria to begin their engagement with the project. More information is available in German below and on the Software Compliance Academy website.
Die Bedeutung der Open Source-Lizenzen und die Frage der Open Source Compliance hat in den vergangenen Jahren vor allem in der IT-Wirtschaft an Bedeutung gewonnen. Aber auch andere Industriezweige sehen sich zunehmend mit Fragen rund um den Einsatz von Open Source-Software konfrontiert:
Welche juristischen Vorgaben gilt es beim Einsatz von Open Source-Software im Unternehmen und vor allem in kommerziellen Produkten zu beachten?
Welche Anforderungen sind an das Lizenzmanagement zu stellen und welchen Beitrag kann ein standardisierter Lizenzmanagement Prozess (OpenChain) leisten?
Welche Möglichkeiten (und welche Grenzen) bieten technische Ansätze im Bereich Lizenzmanagement?
Sofern diese Fragen auch für Sie oder Ihre Kooperationspartner bzw. Ihr Netzwerk von Interesse sind, möchte ich Sie gerne auf unser kommendes zweitägiges Open Source Compliance Seminar in Berlin am 14. und 15. Juni 2018 hinweisen. Neben den Referenten der Software Compliance Academy wird auch Shane Coughlan, Leiter des OpenChain Projektes bei der Linux Foundation, einen Teil des Seminars übernehmen und die aktuellen Entwicklungen des OpenChain Projektes vorstellen.
The OpenChain Project has received a contribution of localized onboarding slides from Bird & Bird in Germany. This short deck is designed to help organizations without prior knowledge of OpenChain understand the reasoning and key benefits behind the project. This marks another milestone in the on-going internationalization of OpenChain-related material to support both OpenChain Conformance and broader open source compliance activities in organizations of all sizes. As with all OpenChain contributions, these slides are licensed under CC-0.
“Germany sees increasing interest in building trust that supplied software conforms to applicable open source licenses” says Dr. Miriam Ballhausen, Senior Associate at Bird & Bird. “OpenChain can already serve to demonstrate that such trust is justified. On many occasions, though, organizations in Germany have tackled building trust in their supply chains on their own accord. They have regularly defined requirements for quality compliance programs that considerably overlap with the OpenChain specification. But it still shows that OpenChain has not been sufficiently furthered with English language onboarding material. The German translation aims to fill this gap and support outreach in German speaking countries.”
Today features the second OpenChain Workshop in Taipei. This event builds on a compliance workshop held during April and marks another step towards the Legal Track that OpenChain will help organize at the COSCUP conference on August 11th and 12th.
Lucien CH Lin, who has a knowledge background in science and technology law, worked at Academia Sinica in public research in 2005-16. The research results in recent years include: Author of the Taiwan Special Chapter of the Free and Open Source Software Legal Reference Book. , and assist participants from all walks of life to clarify issues such as Open Source, Open Data, CC Licensing, and intellectual property rights and public licensing applications. At present, he has been transferred to a non-governmental firm, and he has served as an advisor to the Open Culture Foundation as a legal advisor. He has allocated time and energy to build an open source legal network (Open Source Legal Network, Taiwan).”
Toyota has built strong ties into the global open source development community and into areas related to open source patent non-aggression and copyright compliance. During the Legal & Licensing Workshop in Barcelona during April 2018 Endo San from the Toyota legal team explained their approach and the benefits it brings.
The OpenChain Project is delighted to announce the immediate availability of a Conformance and Compliance Checklist to assist with quick, easy and effective adoption of key requirements for quality open source compliance programs.
This document is targeted to support direct conformance activities. It frames the key requirements for conformance in a simple yes/no format that can rapidly contextualize progress in an organization. This material was kindly contributed by id Law Partners in Spain and – as with all reference material provided by the OpenChain Project – is available under a Creative Commons 0 license (effectively public domain). You can use, study, share and improve it without restriction.
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.
This material was kindly contributed by 
