News

TOKYO, DECEMBER 17 – Today Uber, a Platinum Member of the OpenChain Project, announces their conformance to the OpenChain Specification. This builds on their long-standing engagement and commitment to the project and a deep engagement with developing our industry standard, accompanying reference material, and our evolution into a formal ISO standard.

The OpenChain Project establishes trust in the open source from which software solutions are built. It accomplishes this by making open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. The OpenChain Specification defines inflection points in business workflows where a compliance process, policy or training should exist to minimize the potential for errors and maximize the efficiency of bringing solutions to market. The companies involved in the OpenChain community number in the hundreds. The OpenChain Specification is being prepared for submission to ISO and evolution from a growing de facto standard into a formal standard.

“Consistent and transparent compliance standards are critical for building trust among the open source community and our business partners,” said Matthew Kuipers, Senior Counsel, Uber. “ We’re increasing our commitment to the community and our partnerships by adopting the Linux Foundation’s OpenChain Specification.” 

“Our collaboration with Uber began as the OpenChain Project scaled as an industry standard,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “Their engagement in our formative growth period provided valuable insight into how next-generation services companies operate today and where they are going tomorrow. Matt and his team have been a pivotal part of our evolution towards becoming an ISO standard and their commitment to excellence has raised the bar for great community engagement globally. We are looking forward to next steps together, particularly in fostering further adoption in areas where agile companies are establishing new markets.”

About Uber

Our mission is to ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion.

We revolutionized personal mobility with Ridesharing, and we are leveraging our platform to redefine the massive meal delivery and logistics industries.

We are a technology platform that uses a global network, leading technology, operational excellence and product expertise to power movement from point A to point B. We develop and operate proprietary technology applications supporting a variety of offerings on our platform. We connect consumers with providers of ride services, restaurants and food delivery services, public transportation networks, e-bikes, e-scooters and other personal mobility options. We use this same network, technology, operational excellence and product expertise to connect shippers with carriers in the freight industry. We are developing technologies to provide autonomous driving vehicle solutions to consumers, networks of vertical take-off and landing vehicles and new solutions to solve everyday problems.

About the OpenChain Project

The OpenChain Project builds trust in open source by making open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. The OpenChain Specification defines a core set of requirements every quality compliance program must satisfy. The OpenChain Curriculum provides the educational foundation for open source processes and solutions, whilst meeting a key requirement of the OpenChain Specification. OpenChain Conformance allows organizations to display their adherence to these requirements. The result is that open source license compliance becomes more predictable, understandable and efficient for participants of the software supply chain.

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.

Media Contacts

Shane Coughlan
+818040358083
coughlan@linux.com

David Rudin over at Microsoft has written a great blog post unpacking how and why OpenChain Conformance was important to his company. Check out some highlights below and do take a moment to read the full post over at Microsoft’s official Open Source Blog.

Trust is key to open source. Developers should be able to trust users to respect their licensing choices. And when you receive software, you should be able to trust that the open source licenses were followed. The OpenChain Project plays an important role in building trust by setting standards that define how to operate a high-quality open source compliance program. It means that when you receive open source from a company that follows the OpenChain standard, you can be assured that the code went through a rigorous license compliance process. You can trust it.

At Microsoft we’re continually working with the community to help build and enhance trust in open source. When we first started working with OpenChain, our goal was to help develop a specification that could meet the compliance needs of the entire open source community – from the single developer to the largest enterprise. And today we’re happy to announce that Microsoft is now OpenChain 2.0 conformant.

Read The Full Blog Post

• https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/12/12/announcing-microsoft-openchain-conformance/

The OpenChain Project is delighted to announce that we have official business cards and lanyards for our contributors around the world to use at events. We are releasing these today so that our vibrant community can proudly identify with our project while sharing leaflets, hosting booths and attending broader open source conferences.

Get these documents and many more in the OpenChain Reference Library.

Q&A

Can you send me printed copies?

Perhaps. We are doing limited print runs. These business cards and badges are really designed for local printing to allow maximum efficiency.

Can I remix?

Sure, but please run the remix by our general manager for approval at scoughlan@linuxfoundation.org

SAN FRANCISCO, DECEMBER 12 – Today, the OpenChain Project announced Microsoft, a Platinum Member, is the latest company to achieve OpenChain conformance.  This milestone is an example of how OpenChain can be an important part of building quality open source compliance programs that meet the needs of companies and that build trust in the ecosystem. 

The OpenChain Project establishes trust in the open source from which software solutions are built. It accomplishes this by making open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. The OpenChain Specification defines inflection points in business workflows where a compliance process, policy or training should exist to minimize the potential for errors and maximize the efficiency of bringing solutions to market. The companies involved in the OpenChain community number in the hundreds. The OpenChain Specification is being prepared for submission to ISO and evolution from a growing de facto standard into a formal standard.

“Open source compliance is a top priority for Microsoft and we respect the license choices developers make”, said David Rudin, Assistant General Counsel, Microsoft. “We value our partnership with OpenChain to help build trust in the larger open source community. Through investments in open source policy, tools to identify open source software, and collaboration with the open source community in projects like OpenChain, the TODO Group, and ClearlyDefined, we are committed to working with the community to develop and share best practices for open source compliance.”

“Microsoft has been an exceptional contributor to the OpenChain Project both in terms of board engagement and in broader engagement with our work teams around the world,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “One of the defining aspects of the OpenChain industry standard is our broad applicability to companies of all sizes and in all sectors. It has been fantastic to work with Microsoft to understand the needs of the cloud and large enterprises, especially with regards to how some approaches differ to consumer electronic, infrastructure and other markets. The conformance announcement today is a milestone that greatly supports our evolution as we head into 2020 and underlines once again the value of our continued collaboration.”

About the OpenChain Project

The OpenChain Project builds trust in open source by making open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. The OpenChain Specification defines a core set of requirements every quality compliance program must satisfy. The OpenChain Curriculum provides the educational foundation for open source processes and solutions, whilst meeting a key requirement of the OpenChain Specification. OpenChain Conformance allows organizations to display their adherence to these requirements. The result is that open source license compliance becomes more predictable, understandable and efficient for participants of the software supply chain.

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.

Media Contacts

Shane Coughlan
+818040358083
coughlan@linux.com

The OpenChain Reference Training Slides for OpenChain 2.0 are now available in Traditional Chinese.

OpenChain Reference Training Slides for OpenChain 2.0 – Traditional Chinese from Shane Coughlan

Big thanks are due to Andrew Katz and his teams at Moorcrofts and Orcro for preparing this material. As with all OpenChain reference material these slides are available under CC-O licensing, effectively public domain.

Get the Slides

• Powerpoint
• PDF
• Open Document

Contribute via Github

• https://github.com/OpenChain-Project/Reference-Material

The second meeting of the OpenChain China Work Group is underway right now at the Baidu offices in Beijing. This event, kindly hosted and supported by our friends from companies like Baidu, Huawei and JD.com, provides a great opportunity to share notes and make plans ahead of 2020!

As you can see there are plenty of smiles alongside more serious discussions. It is also worth noting the gender balance in the room. Thank you China WG for leading the way!

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Thanks to the tremendous work of Andrew Katz, his team at Moorcrofts, and the team at Orcro, the OpenChain Project offers an open source policy template to support our industry standard. This is a frequently requested aspect of our reference material and – as with all OpenChain reference material – it is available under CC-0 licensing, effectively public domain.

Get the Template in Traditional Chinese

• Word Format
• Open Document Format

Get the Template in English

• Excel Format
• Open Document Format

Help Us Translate

You can help support our internationalization efforts via Github. Get these guides and many more documents in the OpenChain Reference Library. You can find out more and discuss this template on our mailing list.

We are delighted to announce the release of the fourth OpenChain community interview. This time we had a chance to sit down with Maggie from Ladas and Perry, an active contributor to the OpenChain China Work Group, and a key figure in the broader Chinese open source technology community.

Read the Interview

• https://www.openchainproject.org/openchain-interview-4

We have a terrific amount of activity in the OpenChain Project. A lot happens around our calls, where we often record audio and video, but we occasionally get asked for other formats too. Time and resources prohibit us from transcribing calls but there are some avenues to explore. Our conference provider offers automated transcriptions and today – for the first time – we are exploring how these may be shared with the community.

There are errors in the documents. We are providing a PDF and a Word document, the former for quick review, the latter to contribute fixes. Our goal is to test offering a new way to catch up on what happened. We are particularly interested in seeing if this provides utility to non-native English speakers.

Our test release is a transcript of Russ from GM – First Monday November – talking about how open source works in the US automotive space.

Quick Read (PDF)

• https://www.openchainproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2019/12/November-First-Monday-Automatic-Transcript.pdf

Edit and Fix (DOCX)

• https://www.openchainproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2019/12/November-First-Monday-Automatic-Transcript.docx

Q&A

What release an imperfect transcript?

Because our community might find it useful.

Shouldn’t the project focus on excellence and avoid releasing documents with typographical errors?

We are an open project with a global community. We work hard to make all of our official documentation clear, simple and free of errors. However, we also have a lot of other material, such as these automated transcripts, and we are experimenting with providing access.

Who would find this useful?

Non-native English speakers who may have difficulty understanding spoken English. Written English, even imperfect written English, may be useful.

Where do I send feedback?

scoughlan@linuxfoundation.org

One exciting outcome of the OpenChain Korea Work Group meeting # 4 was the release of our first Korean case studies. These case studies from SK Telecom and NCSoft cover Open Source Governance Organization approaches inside their respective companies. They are currently only available in Korean.

Check Them Out

SK Telecom – Open Source Governance Organization – December 2nd from Shane Coughlan

NCSoft – Open Source Governance Organization – December 2nd from Shane Coughlan