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Shane Coughlan

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.

ZTE Announces OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230 Conformant Program

By Featured, News

ZTE, a global leader in telecommunications and information technology, has obtained OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230 conformance with the assistance of CAICT. This third-party certification is a landmark in expressing both dedication to excellent in process management and leadership in open source by a Chinese multi-national company.

“ZTE operates in over 160 countries and serves one fourth of the world’s population with current and next-generation technology solutions,” says Xiang Shuming, Director of Compliance and Security Governance, ZTE. “Open source is a pivotal part of our ability to innovate, and we are committed to being at the forefront of management as well as development in this field. We are proud to announce our OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230 certification and we look forward to continuing to work with CAICT and the OpenChain Project in the years ahead.”

“CAICT began our OpenChain third-party certification project in Q1 2022 as an official partner of the OpenChain Project,” says Guo Xue, Deputy director , CAICT. “ZTE is the fourth company – and the largest so far – that we have collaborated with in certification. We are deeply appreciative both of their commitment to excellence in open source, and with the spirit of community that ZTE and other recent Chinese conformant organizations have expressed. Chinese companies have always been significantly engaged with open source, and we are entering a new era of global leadership.”

“It has been an exceptional year for the OpenChain Project in China. We have strong leadership from OpenChain board member companies like OPPO, Huawei and HONOR, and a fantastic community with 220 participants,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “Working with CAICT and with all types of other contributor in our China Work Group has been both productive and rewarding. Today’s announcement regarding ZTE conformance is part of this story, and it is a lighthouse to help inspire companies inside China and far beyond its borders. We are grateful for all the work that has been done, and we look forward to all the work we will do together in the years ahead.”

About the OpenChain Project 

The OpenChain Project maintains the International Standard for open source license compliance. This allows companies of all sizes and in all sectors to adopt the key requirements of a quality open source compliance program. This is an open standard and all parties are welcome to engage with our community, to share their knowledge, and to contribute to the future of our standard.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

OpenChain Webinar #42 – Quantifying Open Source Risk in M&A – 2022-05-30

By Featured, News

The OpenChain Project will hold its 42nd webinar on the 30th of May at 14:00 UTC. Our special guest will be Phil Odence from Synopsys with a deep dive into Quantifying Open Source Risk in M&A.

This event will be held in the OpenChain Project Zoom room:
https://zoom.us/j/4377592799

Check your timezone:
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Compare timezones:
https://www.worldtimebuddy.com

Join via one tap mobile:
+86 10 8783 3177,,4377592799# Mainland China
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Find your local country number:
https://zoom.us/u/awFnORNiA
Meeting ID: 437 759 2799

External Blog: Open Source License Compliance with OpenChain

By News

Ulrike Fempel from SAP has a few thoughts to share.

What is the OpenChain Project, and how has SAP adopted the corresponding standard? In my current role in the SAP Open Source Program Office, I was involved in several activities around SAP’s OpenChain certification and would like to share some insights in this blog post. 

With numerous open-source licenses available (more than a hundred licenses approved by the OSI) and new ones emerging constantly, it is important for companies that manage open-source software to fulfill all legal requirements and obligations. The OpenChain Project, launched in 2016 under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, aims to support companies with their license compliance across the open-source software supply chain and has been adopted by a wide range of companies and a broad community. The mission of OpenChain is “a supply chain where open source is delivered with trusted and consistent compliance information” (more). In 2020 it had matured enough to be accepted as an ISO standard, which runs under the name of ISO/IEC 5230 and is considered the International Standard for open-source license compliance. Global and local working groups address the needs of different industries and regional adopters and help to improve and enhance the project continuously. Anybody is invited to freely use the existing OpenChain content, whether training material, policy templates, or developer guidelines. There are more than 1000 reference documents, such as how-to guides available on GitHub including reference guides for software supply chain security.  

In March 2022, SAP finished its certification for ISO/IEC 5230 conformance. As mentioned in the related press release this was “the first time an enterprise application software company has undergone whole entity conformance” meaning that SAP as an entire company was certified. What was SAP’s experience with the OpenChain certification? What were the prerequisites and how much effort did it take? 

Read The Rest…

LF Blog: More Time on Innovating, Less Time on Compliance

By Featured, News

What better way to celebrate our 1,000 news post on the OpenChain website than to see what other people are saying about us? Check out this post by Dan Whiting over on the official LF blog:

[There] are also challenges in this space, with a good example being the question of how to address licensing. There are A LOT of types of licenses that can apply to a piece of software/code. Each license needs to be understood and tracked with each piece of software it is included in for an organization to ensure nothing is missed. This can quickly multiply into a significant catalog that requires lots of manual work. On top of that, you also need to provide that license information to each of your customers, and they will have their own system and/or processes for providing that information to them and making sure it is up-to-date with each new version of the software. 

You can see where this can quickly consume valuable staff resources and open doors to mistakes. Imagine the possibility of a standard way to track and report the licenses so your teams don’t need to worry about all of the digital paperwork and can instead focus on innovation and adding value to you and your customers.

This is exactly the problem a team of lawyers and governance experts sought to fix back in 2016 and created the OpenChain Project to do just that. They asked, what are the key things for open source compliance that everyone needs, and how do we unify the systems and processes. They envisioned an internationally accepted standard to track and report all of the licenses applicable to a software project. The end result is a more trustable supply chain where organizations don’t need to spend tons of time checking compliance again and again and then remediating. 

Read More:

OpenChain M&A Summit 2022 – April 28th @ 14:00 UTC

By Featured, News

The OpenChain M&A Summit 2022 brings together key law firms and service providers helping clients with M&A. You will come away from this event with a clearer understanding of global trends around open source mergers and acquisitions. Free and open to everyone.

Timing

This event takes places at 14:00 UTC on April 28th and runs for around three hours. That translates to:

  • 07:00 PDT
  • 12:00 EDT
  • 16:00 CEST
  • 19:30 IST
  • 22:00 CST
  • 23:00 KST
  • 23:00 JST

Agenda

  • An Overview of A Typical M&A With OpenChain
    Leon Schwartz, GTC Law
  • M&A From The Perspective Of Security
    Jan Thielscher, EACG
  • Checking Compliance With FOSSmatrix
    Hendrik Schottle, Osborne Clark
  • Sustainability Of Open Source Licenses
    Dr. Andreas Kotulla, Bitsea
  • Specific M&A Transaction Case Study
    Marcel Scholze, PwC
  • Panel with all presenters

RSVP (Required for Entry)

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PZYg-Mm6TN2OOx-8baqmEg