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 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.”
The OpenChain Project held its annual an all-day summit adjacent to Open Source Summit Europe (OSS EU) on the 14th of September. This event featured news from our latest board meeting (including the decision to launch our new security specification), a deep dive into a significant new automation landscape to assist with license, security and export control compliance, SBOM discussions and more.
Check out the full recording below alongside copies of our excellent keynote presentation from Andrew Katz of Orcro and the automation landscape capability map presentation delivered by Jan Thielscher of EACG on behalf of the OpenChain Reference Tooling Work Group.
Here are the key takeaways:
The OpenChain Project now maintains a family of specifications to build trust in the supply chain. We started with license compliance and now we have a sister standard for security.
Open source automation for open source license, security and export control compliance is getting a clear capability map to guide investment of resources and save time.
Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) has seen great progress in the last year or two, and the OpenChain Telco Work Group is working on very practical items related to market adoption.
Open source licensing discussions have become somewhat stale and there is scope for considering the future of open source licensing approaches.
The OpenChain Security Assurance Specification 1.0 is now available. This is the result of over one year of work throughout the global OpenChain community. It is applicable to an open source management activity related to security compliance. We regard this as adjacent but different to license compliance.
The OpenChain Project’s core mission is to build trust in the supply chain. Our flagship specification, ISO/IEC 5230:2020, is International Standard for Open Source Compliance and builds trust in that domain. It defines the key requirements of a quality open source compliance program. The natural next step is to identify the key requirements of a quality open source security assurance program.
Initially the scope of this specification is limited to ensuring that an organization vets open source with regards to known publicly available security vulnerability issues (e.g., CVEs, GitHub dependency alerts, package manager alerts and so on). The security assurance specification’s scope may expand over time based on community feedback.
This specification is built from the Security Assurance Reference Guide 2.0 (Release Candidate 1) published on 2022-03-28. That completed reference specification document went through a final approval process via editing on our specification list and calls, before graduating to a governing board vote to transform into this published security specification on 2022-09-14.
Next Steps
We will proceed to ISO/IEC JTC-1 PAS submission with an estimated completion date of circa mid-2023. In the meantime, our security assurance specification is ready for market adoption as a de facto standard.
Prior to the ISO/IEC JTC-1 PAS submission, we have some time for sanity-checks and minor adjustments. We begin that process today and will complete it on October 4th2022 (2022-10-04). There are two tasks for the community ahead of that date:
You can submit issues highlighting areas you would like review on our GitHub repository. Please note, due to this being a specification, we will only accept issues for discussion. We will not accept pull requests or remixes.
In the coming days we will have broader distribution of the specification launch, including on social media and via blog posts. However, you can begin sharing it immediately with your teams and peers.
Please note:
The scope of this reference specification may expand over time based on community feedback. However, comments and notes should be confined to the existing scope at this juncture. Our specification is complete barring minor adjustments for readability, editing and clarity.
Please note:
This specification is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0). You can submit issues highlighting areas you would like review on our GitHub repository. Due to this being a specification, we will only accept issues for discussion. We will not accept pull requests or remixes. You can get more involved with our work beyond submitting issues via our community calls, mailing lists and events: https://www.openchainproject.org/community
The work we did on this playbook substantially refined the approach in the early parts of the document and will be merged into the other documents (for medium and large companies).
Your contributions and comments are most welcome. This is a great opportunity to brief and encourage strategic management understanding and support of effective, efficient compliance.
