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 full recording of our recent Education Work Group meeting is now available. Big news this time around as we lock down collaboration with LF Training to make a free online course (we get their stuff as CC-0!), how we will work, and our target release dates.
Join Our Education Mailing List to Stay Involved
Our regular bi-weekly webinar will cover an exciting topic at 5pm Pacific today (Monday) – 8am Beijing/Taipei – 9am Seoul/Tokyo (Tuesday).
Tim Bird of Sony will cover ‘Issues with Open Source License Compliance in Consumer Electronics’, a variant of a speech recently delivered at Open Source Summit Europe, and made available live here for audiences in the USA and Asia.
Attend the Talk
One Tap Telephone (no screensharing)
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abeUqy3kYQ
After dialing the local number enter 9990120120#
View the Slides
The OpenChain Project hosted a special three hour mini-summit to explain the three options for compliance to the International Standard for open source compliance. Learn about self-certification, independent assessment and third-party certification from the experts in each area.
The core of the International Standard for open source license compliance is self-certification. This is a process where a company reviews the requirements of the standard and checks whether their current processes match these requirements. If necessary, a company can make adjustments to processes. Self-certification can be accomplished in several ways. The most common are:
Companies often want assistance in adopting an International Standard. One common form is Independent Assessment, where a knowledgable service provider reviews a company’s processes and provides objective feedback on where adjustments or improvements may be necessary. The OpenChain International Standard for open source compliance has a process called “Independent Compliance Assessment” that is provided by trusted partners of the project. These partners may be law firms or service vendors. Two of our existing partners, Source Code Control (UK) and AlektoMetis (Germany), hosted a session explaining this approach and their respective service offerings.
In some markets third-party certification is an important part of inter-company relationships. Examples are automotive, infrastructure and aviation, where strict regulation and regular audits are well-served by formal certification by third-parties. The OpenChain International Standard for open source compliance approaches third-party certification in the same way as other International Standards. Two of our existing partners, PwC (Germany) and Orcro (UK), hosted a session explaining this approach and their respective service offerings.
This event is part of the overarching OpenChain Project Webinar Series. Our series highlights knowledge from throughout the global OpenChain eco-system. Participants are discussing approaches, processes and activities from their experience, providing a free service to increase shared knowledge in the supply chain. Our goal, as always, is to increase trust and therefore efficiency. No registration or costs involved. This is user companies producing great informative content for their peers.
This OpenChain Webinar was broadcast on 2020-11-06.
The OpenChain India Work Group held its third meeting on the 30th of October 2020. Check out the full recording and join our future activity via our dedicated mailing list.
The Mailing List
We had a great discussion on the most recent fourth Monday Specification meeting. Key topics were around timescales for releases (we plan to have long periods between releases) and expanding this call to cover our other global work teams as well (which we decided was a good idea).
Check it out below and look forward to an expanded format in November.
Balakrishna @ Bosch led the revival of the OpenChain Education Work Group with two meetings exploring the creation of online training for the International Standard for open source license compliance. Catch up and contribute via these recordings and by subscribing to our list.
Join Our Education Mailing List and Help Make This Happen
On October 28th at 19:30 GMT Shane Coughlan spoke at Open Source Summit Europe 2020. His talk explored the process of building and deploying the first Linux Foundation ISO standard in fourteen years in collaboration with the Joint Development Foundation. It explained why the evolution from de facto industry standard to formal standardization was important for open source compliance in the context of areas like sales, procurement and M&A.
inwinSTACK, a Taiwan-based provider of private, public and hybrid cloud technology, is the latest organization to announce an OpenChain conformant program. inwinSTACK has been contributing in open source community, providing services/products with open source software. Participating in workgroups of Linux Foundation among AI, Edge and Hyperledger. “OpenChain Conformance also present our commitment to open source compliance”, says Joeseph Wang, Sales VP, InwinSTACK Technologies Inc. “Licensing compliance give indemnification for our customers free from intellectual property lawsuit. We have enforced OpenChain Conformance throughout in internal CI/CD process. Also planning to pass ISO/IEC DIS 5203 in the future. Our long term policy will keep devoting in open source communities”
“We are delighted to welcome inwinSTACK to our community of conformance for several reasons,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “Their position as a cloud provider helps to underscore the utility of OpenChain in this space, where our International Standard for open source compliance has a positive impact on resource use, time to market, and effective intellection property management. Secondly, it is great to welcome another company based in Taiwan to our community, underlining our vibrant, growing local community. We look forward to working with inwinSTACK and many of their peers in the coming years.”
October 29, 2020 – The OpenChain Project is delighted to welcome Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds as the latest law firm to join our global Partner Program. Their experience and support will be available to help support open source software user companies during the exciting period of the ISO/IEC JTC1 publication of our International Standard for open source license compliance.
“Law firms play a critical role in supporting companies using open source throughout the globe,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “Our collaboration with Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds is perfectly timed to support a key milestone in the OpenChain Project; the approval of our International Standard for publication via ISO/IEC JTC1. We look forward to a long, productive relationship with our latest partner in the months and years ahead.”
“We are thrilled to be a Linux Foundation OpenChain Partner,” says Giovanna Fessenden, Counsel at Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds. “While open source software is invaluable to software innovation, one of the challenges in software supply chains is ensuring that the open source license requirements for source code are met in a timely and effective manner. Widespread compliance with the OpenChain ISO standard will address these challenges. As adherence to the OpenChain ISO standard gains momentum in the software industry, I expect to see even more growth in investment in software innovation, as well as increased industry collaboration in the development of software technology. Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds values this unique opportunity to work with the Linux Foundation OpenChain Project to develop and share best practices for open source compliance. Our firm’s goal is to ultimately help build trust and legal certainty in the larger open source community.”
Mary Lou Wakimura, Principal at Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds, stated, “As an OpenChain Partner, we look forward to instilling best practices for open source compliance which dovetails with our services and advice to clients in the software technology space. We look forward to continuing the work of the Linux Foundation OpenChain Project in this important next stage of industry adoption of the OpenChain ISO standard.”
About Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds
Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds is an internationally renowned law firm devoted to the practice of intellectual property law. The firm specializes in patents, trademarks, intellectual property litigation, post-grant proceedings, copyrights, licensing, due diligence, opinions, trade secrets, open source license compliance and audits, and intellectual property counseling. The firm’s legal staff provides comprehensive intellectual property expertise in a wide range of technical areas such as biotechnology, chemistry, computer hardware and software, telecommunications, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, physics, optics, nanotechnology, and electrical, chemical and mechanical engineering. Visit hbsr.com for more information.
About OpenChain Project
OpenChain began when a group of open source compliance professionals met in a conference lounge and chatted about how so much duplicative, redundant open source license compliance work was being done inefficiently in the software supply chain simply. They realized that while each company did the same work behind the scenes in a different manner the output for downstream recipients could not realistically be relied on because there was no visibility into the process that generated the output.
The answer the early principles of this discussion arrived at was to standardize open source compliance, make it transparent and build trust across the ecosystem. The project began as outreach to the community with the idea of a new standard for open source license compliance with slides titled, “When Conformity is Innovative.” A growing community quickly recognized the value of this approach and contributed to the nascent collaboration soon named The OpenChain Project.
Newsletter – Issue 42 – October 2020
Our newsletter contains some of the highlights from the last month of activity in the project. Plenty more happened. Check out the full stream here:
https://www.openchainproject.org/news
OpenChain @ Sales and Procurement
We launched a leaflet to help Sales and Procurement Departments understand and include the OpenChain standard for open source compliance in their workflow.
https://www.openchainproject.org/featured/2020/09/11/openchain-sales-and-procurement-leaflet-now-available
OpenChain @ Partners
Synopsys has joined the OpenChain Partner program.
https://www.openchainproject.org/featured/2020/09/03/wipro-limited-is-the-latest-openchain-partner-2
OpenChain @ Conformance
InterneuronCIC announced OpenChain 2.0 conformance
https://www.openchainproject.org/featured/2020/09/10/interneuroncic-announces-openchain-2-0-conformance
OpenChain @ Webinars #11 & 12:
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