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.
Seth Newberry from the Joint Development Foundation joined us to provide an overview of what they do, how it impacts OpenChain, and what it means for other open source and related projects moving forward. As always we had some great comments and questions, and we look forward to getting more over time via our mailing lists and meetings!
This webinar was a live walk-through of the Conformance Questionnaire with example solutions to each question required for OpenChain conformance. It was designed to be immediately useful to any organization considering or undergoing OpenChain conformance.
We took a look at how GitLab addresses compliance for this webinar on the 20th of July. Mo Khan, Senior Backend Engineer, explained the approach offered to users and why it is effective. One of the most interesting things we explored is how it all works with CI/CD, a hot topic in the OpenChain community and beyond.
This webinar covered two strategic topics. VM (Vicky) Brasseur opened with a discussion on Lessons Learned over her wide-ranging career in open source and business. Katy Gibson and Robert Grannells then discussed how an initiative in the UK is fostering Future Leaders in our field, a timely topic given recent observations by parties like Linus regarding the challenge of finding new blood to take over old projects.
VM (Vicky) Brasseur corporate strategist, open source & technical leader, author, speaker Resume Book About Publications Presentations
VM (Vicky) Brasseur is an award-winning free/open source advocate and corporate strategist, international keynote speaker, and writer. She’s the author of Forge Your Future with Open Source, the only book detailing how to contribute to free/open source (FOSS) projects. Aside from articles in various publications, she also writes about FOSS, business, and their intersection on her blog.
Katy Gibson – Associate Commercial IP/IT Solicitor – Bristows LLP – Co-chair of the OpenUK Future Leaders Group
Katy is an Associate in the Commercial IP/IT Team at Bristows LLP and advises on a variety of matters involving data protection, IT and intellectual property for clients in a range of industries, including those within the Life Sciences and TMT sectors. She trained at Bristows and qualified in 2018.
Robert Grannells – Associate Technology Solicitor – Fieldfisher LLP – Co-chair of the OpenUK Future Leaders Group
Robert is a technology lawyer experienced in advising a variety of clients of all sectors and sizes, on a variety of issues across software, hardware, infrastructure, networking, open source and web technologies. He has extensive knowledge of the actual technology underpinning what his clients do, want they want to use and how they need it to work to get business done.
Amanda Brock, CEO at OpenUK
Amanda is CEO of the UK body for “open technology being open source software, open hardware and open data”, OpenUK; the Chair of the Open Source and Intellectual Property (IP) Advisory Group of the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs; European Representative of the world’s biggest defensive patent pool, the Open Invention Network; OASIS Open Projects’ Advisory Council Member(open source and open standards); Advisory Board Member KDE; Advisory Board Member Beamery and Mentors C Suite individuals.
In this webinar we covered “OpenChain China, Japan, Korea – a discussion on community building” featuring short interviews with Jerry (China), Haksung (Korea) and Fukuchi San (Japan) about local community activity. Our goal was to share knowledge on what has worked, what has not, and how momentum can be kept in these unusual times. We hope these lessons will assist our fellows in Europe and North America while also illustrating some of the key successes in Asia.
This is part of the bi-weekly OpenChain Webinar series. Every two weeks we have international speakers covering a wide range of topics related to practical open source compliance challenges, solutions and considerations.
This time we explored Software Heritage, an initiative whose goal is to collect, preserve, and share software code, and continued our discussion of containers from the perspective of scalable compliance.
Our speakers
Roberto Di Cosmo, Director at Software Heritage, explained why this initiative collects and preserves software in source code form with the understanding that software embodies key technical and scientific knowledge that humanity cannot afford to risk losing. His presentation helped provide insight into how such initiatives can link into activities like compliance automation in open source compliance, an area of immediate interest to the OpenChain community.
Scott Peterson, Senior Commercial Counsel at Red Hat, talked about how we can make compliance scalable in a container world. This talk will build on other recent presentations with a particular focus on efficiency and portability, with a “registry-native” approach to source code availability. Scott explained how this does not require updating container registries to include source code specific features, but instead can exploit features that are already contained in current registries.
In this webinar we unpacked how the newly released SPDX 2.2. SPDX, as a leading industry standard for Software Bill of Materials, plays a pivotal role in the implementation of practical manual and automated compliance programs.
Kate Stewart, Sr. Director of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation, explained how SPDX 2.2 works and what it means for the community. Kate has been a key driver of this standard over the last 10 years and can answer all your questions about what the current standard means, what projects support it, and the current state of the tooling landscape.
Yoshiyuki Ito, Principal Expert at RENESAS Electronics, provided an overview of SPDX Lite. This is a “Profile” for the SPDX 2.2 standard that helps companies deploy the Software Bill of Materials to match certain workflows, particularly with respect to suppliers to large companies using existing processes. Ito San and others in the OpenChain Japan Work Group created SDPX Lite to help ensure that the standard could seek adoption in as many production environments as possible with minimal friction.
In this webinar Tobie Langel spoke about ‘Open Source Contribution Policies That Don’t Suck.’ Leon Schwartz and Tony Decicco from GTC Law provided an overview of open source-related topics in the context of mergers, acquisitions, financings, investments, IPOs, divestitures, loans, customer license agreements, rep and warranty insurance and other transactions. Andrew Katz presented a due diligence questionnaire and sample warranties based on the the OpenChain specification.
More About This Webinar
Tobie Langel spoke about ‘Open Source Contribution Policies That Don’t Suck.’ In his own words: Open source contribution policies are long, boring, overlooked documents, that generally suck. They’re designed to protect the company at all costs. But in the process, end up hurting engineering productivity, and morale. Sometimes they even unknowingly put corporate IP at risk. But that’s not inevitable. It’s possible to write open source contribution policies that make engineers lives easier, boost morale and productivity, reduce attrition, and attract new talent. And it’s possible to do so while reducing the company’s IP risk, not increasing it.
Leon Schwartz and Tony Decicco from GTC Law provided an overview of open source-related topics in the context of mergers, acquisitions, financings, investments, IPOs, divestitures, loans, customer license agreements, rep and warranty insurance and other transactions. This covered:
Types of open source risk
Open source due diligence as part of transactions
Open source-related terms in agreements
The strategic use of open source in transactions
Andrew Katz presented a due diligence questionnaire and sample warranties based on the the OpenChain specification, and explained how adoption of this framework will drive further adoption of the standard. This builds on the observation that the OpenChain specification provides a great framework for due diligence and share purchase agreement warranties, even where the target is a software company which is not OpenChain compliant.
