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.
On this episode we had Seth Newberry from Joint Development Foundation join the call and explain how the new Community Specification on GitHub can help projects prepare for building sustainable standards. We also took a moment to go through the ever-increasing OpenChain Reference library. There is a ton of material there that we are currently improving and making easier to discover ahead of our formal ISO publication in a couple of weeks.
In our biggest webinar to date, Jari Koivisto talked about Open Source Issues Remediation, Gary O’Neall talked about Community Bridge and SPDX Online Tools and David Wheeler talked about CII Best Practices (the project equivalent of the OpenChain standard). Check out the full recording and the slides below.
The OpenChain Project is delighted to announce the availability of a new leaflet designed to help Sales and Procurement Departments understand and include the OpenChain standard for open source compliance in their workflow. As with all OpenChain reference material this is provided under CC-0 licensing, effectively public domain, and suggestions or improvements are always welcome.
InterneuronCIC was an early adopter of the OpenChain industry standard for open source compliance, and have had an OpenChain 1.2 conformant program for a considerable time. Today they have completed conformance to OpenChain 2.0, the latest version of our standard, and a specification that is functionally identical to our forthcoming ISO International Standard. A big congratulations to all the team.
We have kept the original English text for now at the side because that makes it easier to compare and check the translation. In the final version this will be removed and only the German text will be kept.
As a spreadsheet it’s not ideal for detailed review of specific parts of the text. If it’s more convenient for you feel free to copy it into another form of document and comment there.
If you have any questions or would like to get involved you can also contact me or Stefan Thanheiser <stefan.thanheiser@fiduciagad.de> directly.
The plan for the next steps is to get the document a round of reviews, incorporate the resulting feedback, and then create a pull request to the reference material repository with the final version.
Cornelius Schumacher Open Source StewardChief Technology Office (T.IVO) DB Systel GmbH
The OpenChain UK Work Group is holding its second meeting via Zoom on Wednesday 30 September from 14:00 – 16:00 BST.
This meeting will build on the success of the inaugural meeting in July which attracted a stellar roster of speakers, including: Shane Coughlan (Linux Foundation), Kate Stewart (Linux Foundation), Hiroyuki Fukuchi (Sony), Andrew Katz (Orcro), Sami Atabani (Arm),Thomas Steenbergen (HERE Technologies) and Mirko Boehm, as well as a diverse range of delegates from around the world.
Bookings for the September meeting are now open and can be made via the Eventbrite booking form.
The meeting is free of charge, and is 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.
Andrew Katz, Joint Managing Partner of Moorcrofts, CEO of Orcro Limited and Chair of the OpenChain UK Work Group, said:
“We’re delighted to see such a high calibre of organisations and individuals involved in the group at the early stages. As we move forward, we hope to see smaller companies join, who are looking to start their OpenChain journey, so we can continue to broaden the reach of the group and OpenChain adoption in the UK.”
To join the OpenChain UK Work Group visit: https://lists.openchainproject.org/g/uk-wg and subscribe to the list to receive future details about the bi-monthly meetings and to sync and share information across all aspects of open source compliance. More information about the group can be found on its draft terms of reference document: https://lists.openchainproject.org/g/uk-wg/files.
A new guide created by the OpenChain Korea Work Group in collaboration with NIPA, a Korean government agency, explains how local companies can easily and effectively comply with the OpenChain specification. This guide was prepared based on the following documents:
The OpenChain Project Website
The OpenChain Specification 2.0
The OpenChain Open Source Policy Template
The book by Ibrahim Haddad entitled ‘Open Source Compliance In The Enterprise’
The guide will be revised after the ISO/IEC JTC1 PAS Transposition Process when the OpenChain specification becomes a formal International Standard.
Open Source Security, the company behind grsecurity – a security enhancement to the Linux kernel – has announced an OpenChain conformant program.
“While Open Source Security, Inc. has always taken license compliance seriously and involved highly-qualified legal counsel in drafting our company’s policies in compliance with those licenses, we recently became aware of the OpenChain project and its efforts in formalizing compliance practices within organizations using and improving Free and Open Source software,” says Bradley Spengler, President at Open Source Security. “Having verifiable documentation of our operating and review procedures became top of mind for us as we embark on expanding our operations. Formalizing the policies to include licenses and activities we are not yet involved in left us prepared for the future and was well-received by the team, particularly our junior staff. We thank the OpenChain project for providing a well-thought-out, comprehensive, and accessible standard to help organizations formalize and communicate their compliance practices.”
“The OpenChain industry standard is designed to help companies in all sectors address the issue of process management around the exceptional potential of open source,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “It is great to welcome Open Source Security into the fold with the announcement of another OpenChain conformant program. We look forward to future collaboration as our standard is increasingly adopted in their domain.”
The OpenChain Project now has official merchandise! You will find everything from t-shirts to tote-bags to phone cases to mugs in our store. Everything is priced at cost with Threadless. Logos, penguins, country teams and a special global team image. It is all there.
Check Out The Zero Profit Store!
https://openchainproject.threadless.com/
OpenChain @ Partners
On August 4, 2020 the OpenChain Project announced Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO), a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company as the latest participant in the growing partner program. Wipro will provide an important bridge between companies seeking to adopt the OpenChain industry standard for compliance and the implementation of quality open source compliance programs. https://www.openchainproject.org/featured/2020/08/04/wipro-limited-is-the-latest-openchain-partner
