Sometimes people worry that open source compliance is going to be difficult or expensive. This is a valid concern but it is also one we can quickly address. Open source has been used commercially for decades. All the expensive learning has been completed around licensing, and it is being shared by organizations around the world. After all, our goal is contribution, and cheap, effective compliance is part of that.
This guide from CAICT contains some open source compliance guidelines to help you get started. Think of it as a lighthouse to help guide your journey. The experience contained here will save you time and money. Most importantly, it will open more doors (and more code) to accelerate your products and your innovation.
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.
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.
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 India Work Group has scheduled its next meeting for 17:30 on the 30th of May. This meeting will provide an excellent opportunity not only for the India community to re-connect, but also for representatives from companies around the world to learn more about the (extremely large) local market situation.
As always, this meeting will be accessible via Zoom.
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.
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
The OpenChain Project released a Security Assurance Reference Guide in August 2021. Feedback from the community expanded this into its current form: a Security Assurance Reference Specification (Release Candidate 1 2022-03-28). At the end of June 2022 the OpenChain Steering Committee will decide if this Release Candidate:
Becomes a sister standard to OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230
Becomes an optional component of OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230
Remains a reference specification
This is an important moment for the OpenChain Project, explicitly highlighting our work beyond open source license compliance. Your input is most welcome to help inform our steering committee.
Please open Issues on our GitHub here to provide feedback:
More Information From The Introduction Of The Reference Specification Document:
The OpenChain Project is working towards a supply chain where open source is delivered with trusted and consistent compliance information. We maintain OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230:2020, the International Standard for open source license compliance. Adjacent to this the project maintains a large international community, extensive reference materials, and working groups addressing various domain issues. We support discussions around security, export control, M&A and other topics.
OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230:2020 is a process management specification that identifies inbound, internal and outbound inflection points where a process, policy or training should exist. The identification and tracking of software used and deployed is an inherent part of getting this right, and this also allows our standard to also be useful for security or export control.
The OpenChain Project community noticed that OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230:2020 was being used quite often in deployment discussions and we wanted to support our broader community around these use-cases. The reference specification you are now reading is focused on the security domain. It is intended to identify and describe the key requirements of a quality Security Assurance Program in the context of using Open Source Software. This early iteration of the document focuses on a narrow subset of primary concern: checking Open Source Software against publicly known security vulnerabilities like CVEs, GitHub/GitLab vulnerability reports, and so on.
This document focused on the “what” and “why” aspects of a quality Security Assurance Program rather than delving into to “how” and “when.” This is a conscious decision to ensure flexibility for companies of any size and in any market to use this reference specification. This approach, along with the types of processes identified, is built on more than half a decade of practical global feedback around the creation and management of such programs. The result is that a company can frame a program that precisely fits their supply chain requirements, scoped to a single product or a complete legal entity, and take this solution to market quickly and effectively.
The scope of this reference specification may expand over time based on community feedback.
This introduction describes the reference specification’s purpose. Section 2 defines key terms used throughout this document. Section 3 defines the requirements that a Program must satisfy to achieve a core level of Security Assurance. Each requirement consists of one or more verification materials (i.e., records) that must be produced to satisfy the requirement. Verification materials are not required to be made public, though an organization may choose to provide them to others, potentially under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).
This reference specification is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0). Because it takes the form of a Reference Specification and is therefore intended to fit into the mental model applied to specification creation, it is not designed to be modified outside of the formal editing track. You can take part in editing this document via the OpenChain Project bi-weekly calls. You can learn about joining these calls and our other activities here:
The OpenChain Industry Survey 2022 covers a big topic: the global status of corporate engagement and management of open source. We are considering this from a “strategy” perspective rather than a “development” perspective. Our goal is to help inform project, product and supply chain decisions in the year ahead.
