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 Call to Action series dedicated to break-outs focusing on migrating our reference library to markdown has come to an end. We have seen substantial progress on our goal of ensuring long-term maintainability of the resource library, and in converting key resources into markdown to get us started.
Firstly, you will find updated instructions about our repository here:
The first major outcome of our activity has been completed with the release of the ISO/IEC 5230 self-certification questionnaire in markdown format here:
Your help in reviewing this material, in converting new material and in suggesting improvements to our processes is always welcome. We are now turning this activity over to the Education Work Group, and you will find that here:
The OpenChain Security Assurance Specification 1.1 is being prepared by the Joint Development Foundation for submission to ISO/IEC JTC-1 via the PAS Transposition Process. We expect the specification to graduate as an ISO/IEC International Standard in mid-2023. Meanwhile, it is ready for market adoption as a de facto industry standard.
And how to ensure sustainability of their approach
Like OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230, the International Standard for open source license compliance, the OpenChain Security Assurance Specification 1.1 is lightweight, easy to read and will be extensively supported by our global community with free reference material and conformance resources.
We recently held two calls to review feedback from ISO/IEC WG/SC27 on our recently completed OpenChain Security Assurance Specification. These calls provided feedback ahead of our formal submission into the JTC-1 PAS Transposition Process. Below the video you will find the full guidance provided to our community during this review process. The end result can be found in the OpenChain Security Assurance Specification 1.1, which has now been handed over to Joint Development Foundation (JDF) for entry into the JTC-1 PAS Transposition Process during October.
For reference, here is the full guidance provided to the OpenChain community during these recorded review calls:
ISO/IEC WG/SC27 (security) has provided some feedback on the OpenChain Security Assurance Specification 1.0 for our review. Our review cycle runs from now until October 4th and you can get started on checking their comments via our issue tracker here: https://github.com/OpenChain-Project/Security-Assurance-Specification/issues (This review cycle was closed early as all comments were address by the conclusion of the second call on 29th of September)
We are providing some guidance on the review of these comments and suggestions.
(1) Our specification was completed after a multi-month process in March 2022, and it was ratified by our board for ISO/IEC JTC-1 PAS submission on the 14th of September 2022 (2) Therefore OpenChain Security Assurance Specification 1.0 is functionally complete (3) We should review the ISO/IEC WG comments with this perspective (4) We are looking for editorial adjusts for clarity and errors (5) We are not looking to change the scope or function of OpenChain Security Assurance Specification 1.0 or any immediate clarity / error adjusted successor (6) This is because we want to proceed with our JTC-1 PAS submission as approved by the OpenChain Governing Board (7) But we can place any comments for scope and function adjustment into a deferred status (8) And we will return to them for discussion around inclusion in OpenChain Security Assurance Specification 2.0
This series highlights offerings from various service providers throughout the global OpenChain eco-system. Each featured partner has an official relationship with the project, whereby they may use our trademark for marketing OpenChain-specific services, and in exchange they help with community outreach, education and other aspects of collaborative (and free) support.
The OpenChain Project is delighted to announce the launch of our latest playbook. Focused on small companies, and created by the Education Work Group over the summer, this playbook helps you to contextualize the tasks involved with OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230 adoption. It is short, simple and directly relevant to things like:
Getting management support
Creating realistic policy and processes
Operating an open source program office (OSPO) with low resources
Ensuring you have the key requirements of a quality license compliance program
While targeted towards small companies, the concepts used in this document are useful for medium and large companies as well. This of this as a “minimum viable product” when it comes to considering compliance programs and open source program offices.
As with all our reference material, this playbook is available free of charge and under CC-0 licensing (effectively public domain). It is currently published as a PDF, Word Document and in Open Document Format. More formats will be coming in the future.
The OpenChain Reference Tooling Work Group holds meetings on a bi-weekly schedule. These are designed to allow anyone with an interest in open source tooling for open source compliance to learn more, share ideas, and contribute knowledge. All levels of experience are welcome.
Our new regular schedule is:
First Wednesday @ 08:00 UTC Third Wednesday @ 16:00 UTC
The OpenChain Partner webinars are pre-recorded broadcasts intended to help educate and inform our global community about commercial services available around ISO/IEC 5230. Each webinar is geo-tagged so you can see which primary location it covers.
Learn about SecTrend (China) on the 4th of October @ 15:00 UTC.
Learn more about Bitsea (Germany) on the 18th of October @ 15:00 UTC.
Learn more about PwC (Worldwide) on the 29th of November @ 15:30 UTC.
Check your timezone: PDT United States Pacific UTC-07:00 UTC Coordinated Universal Time UTC CET Central European Time UTC+01:00 IST India Standard Time UTC+05:30 CST China Standard Time UTC+08:00 KST Korea Standard Time UTC+09:00 JST Japan Standard Time UTC+09:00
Join via one tap mobile: +86 10 8783 3177,,4377592799# Mainland China +33 1 8699 5831,,4377592799# France +49 69 7104 9922,,4377592799# Germany +81 524 564 439,,4377592799# Japan +82 2 3143 9612,,4377592799# Korea +91 80 71 279 440,,4377592799# India +886 (2) 7741 7473,,4377592799# Taiwan +44 330 088 5830,,4377592799# UK +13017158592,,4377592799# USA
The OpenChain Germany Work Group will hold its next meeting in collaboration with PwC in Cologne, Germany on the 16th of November 2022. This meeting is open to all and will have plenty of time for networking and sharing knowledge. Find out more by contacting us.
Agenda:
11:00 – 11:15 Welcome (all)
11:15 – 12:00 Introduction to OpenChain Project, news and way forward (Shane)
Moorcrofts LLP and its sister compliance company Orcro Limited, as OpenChain partners invite you to join us at the next meeting of the OpenChain UK Work Group, taking place both virtually and physically (Beck Greener, London) on Thursday 13 October, 11:00 – 13:00.
The keynote speaker for the event will be Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer with eBPF specialists, creators of the Cilium cloud native networking, security and observability project.
Liz is a member of the Open UK Board and was chair of the CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee 2019-2022, and co-chaired the KubeCon / CloudNativeCon 2018 events in Copenhagen, Shanghai and Seattle. She is also the author of Container Security, published by O’Reilly.
She has a wealth of software development, team, and product management experience from working on network protocols and distributed systems, and in digital technology sectors such as VOD, music, and VoIP. When not writing code, or talking about it, Liz loves riding bikes in places with better weather than her native London, competing in virtual races on Zwift, and making music under the pseudonym Insider Nine.
Agenda
11:00: Welcome and introduction by Andrew Katz (Orcro) & Sami Atabani (Arm)
11:10: News and Updates by Shane Coughlan (Linux Foundation)
11:25: OpenChain UK Work Group: Plans by Andrew Katz (Orcro) & Sami Atabani (Arm)
11:45: Liz Rice Key Note
12:45: AOB
13:00: Thank you and goodbye!
OpenChain, a project of the Linux Foundation, brings established governance principles to the software supply chain. It adopts best-practice from other compliance areas and maps them to software procurement, giving businesses a clear path to minimising infringement risk in procuring, developing and deploying software, with particular emphasis on use and re-use of free and open source software (“FOSS”) components. The result is that open source licence compliance becomes more predictable, understandable and efficient for all participants in the software supply chain.
Why Join? With a stellar roster of international businesses adopting the OpenChain framework for Open Source compliance and seeing the benefits of adopting best-practice – helping business teams work together towards a common goal, making Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) more accessible to developers and reducing overall compliance effort, saving time, legal and engineering resources, it makes sense to unify and freely share this work, and help to embed it into the UK’s software development culture.
With this in mind, the OpenChain UK Work Group was born. It is free to join, and open to anyone (whether in the UK or otherwise) interested in finding out more about why companies as diverse as Arm, Google, Scania, Hitachi Data Systems, Toyota, Facebook, Uber and Microsoft are embracing OpenChain, as well as smaller companies like B2M Solutions and NewRoCo. The group also aims to help developers’ and organisations’ journey through open source compliance by providing a practical and accessible platform for anyone in the UK to quickly sync, share information and save time across all aspects of open source compliance.
Book Now To reserve your free place at either the physical or virtual meeting, on 13 October from 11:00 – 13:00, please complete the online booking form.
OpenChain took center stage with a keynote to open Bitkom Forum Open Source 2022. Below you can find a copy of the slides presented by Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. His talk was entitled ‘The Supply Chain Is Broken. We Can Fix it.”
