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 Security Assurance Specification 1.1 is now available in German. Self-certification is also available via checklists and questionnaires. Huge thanks to Katharina and the rest of the the team at PwC for making this happen.
Get the OpenChain Security Assurance Specification 1.1 in German:
If you self-certify, you can be listed on the OpenChain Project website alongside your peers. This is optional but recommended as a useful exercise for the supply chain. Contact us to get the free process underway.
Self-certification for the Security Assurance Specification 1.1 is now available in English, Simplified Chinese and German. More languages are expected to be made available soon.
The OpenChain Project recently held an election for Specification Work Group co-chair. The suggested nominees from the community vote were passed to the OpenChain Governing Board for review and – on the 8th of December – were unanimously accepted by the OpenChain Platinum Members.
The most recent OpenChain Monthly Call focused on editing our license compliance specification (ISO/IEC 5230). We are currently in an edit cycle that will see an update prepared for end-2023 for potential 2024 release. In this call we touched on scope and definitions based on previously submitted issues.
As one key example of our discussion, we covered this GitHub issue:
At the Open Compliance Summit 2022 there was an informal discussion around the recently launched OpenChain Export Control Work Group. The slides are below.
Google, an OpenChain Governing Board member and early adopter of the first generation OpenChain standard for open source license compliance, has announced formal adoption of ISO/IEC 5230, the International Standard for open source license compliance.
“Google has been at the forefront of open source development and the compliant use of open source from its earliest days,” says Hilary Richardson, Open Source Attorney at Google. “The Google Open Source Programs Office prides itself on bringing the best of open source to Google and the best of Google to open source. Responsible use of open source includes respecting developers through compliant use of their code. Google’s participation in the OpenChain project is an important part of supporting industry maturity and predictability in open source compliance.”
“Google has long been a driver of the OpenChain Project, and has been pivotal in the development and granting of ISO/IEC 5230,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “Their conformance announcement aligns their OpenChain program with our shared industry norm, and serves as inspiration for the cloud supply chain and beyond.”
About the OpenChain Project
The OpenChain Project has an extensive global community that involves thousands of companies collaborating to make the supply chain quicker, more effective and more efficient. We work together to create trust between entities around open source. Our job is to increase trust in the open source supply chain. We do this by maintaining ISO/IEC 5230:2020, the International Standard for open source license compliance, and our Security Assurance Reference Specification. We also have a large global community where knowledge is shared to reduce friction and increase efficiency across all aspects of open source process management.
The Linux Foundation is the world’s largest non-profit connecting global technical experts, and providing them with a neutral and trusted platform to develop open source projects. Founded in 2000 as the home of the Linux Kernel, the Linux Foundation has grown to host hundreds of open source projects, with a community spanning 2,950+ members, 540,000+ contributing developers, and 19,000+ contributing companies.
This OpenChain webinar was released as a recording adjacent to the Open Compliance Summit keynotes here in Yokohama, Japan. This time we are having ‘A WebAssembly Fireside Chat with Armijn Hemel,’ unpacking work being done around WebAssembly, compliance and the questions lawyers can usefully ask.
Get the full report Armijn prepared for Linux Foundation here:
Automation plays a huge part in scaling open source compliance in the supply chain. The availability of open source automation for open source compliance is an area where the OpenChain Project has an extremely active work group (check out their mailing list here), so we were interested to note the release of FOSSLight by LG Electronics in 2021. This is a framework for open source compliance used by LG Electronics, LINE and ETRI. It goes beyond scanning and offers a management hub, all at zero cost, and with an open community around it.
FOSSlight and LG Electronics have been awarded the Social DNA Innovation Award 2022 for this work. Well done Kyoungae and all the team!
