Today PwC Germany (https://www.pwc.de/opensource) announces support for OpenChain Conformance activities in companies across all sectors.
The OpenChain Project provides robust Self-Certification to showcase compliance with OpenChain Specification, the industry standard for open source compliance. However, Self-Certification may not always be optimal for organizations with limited experience in open source or those needing to minimize the potential for conflicts of interest via reports from an independent external auditor. PwC and other auditing organizations are working to acknowledge these market requirements and to build further trust in OpenChain Conformance through two approaches:
• PwC supports organizations, providing operational excellence, guidance and reviews setting up required processes, guidelines and policies for an OpenChain Conformance program.
• PwC audits organizations’ OpenChain Conformance program as an external independent auditor and reports against the OpenChain Specification in a formal international reporting format and attestation. This provides trust in OSS management especially in the supply chain.
Through integration of third-party assessors and advisory firms in the OpenChain community, a platform is created to further enable the industry-wide acceptance of the OpenChain standard which is very valuable especially for supply chains.
SAN FRANCISCO, October 10, 2019 – HH Partners, a law firm based in Finland, today announces participation in the OpenChain Project. HH Partners intends to support adoption of the OpenChain industry standard for open source compliance both inside Finland and across the broader global market. HH Partners will be contributing to the OpenChain project both via its open technology practice and via its own open source compliance research project, Double Open.
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 in the supply chain is a challenge to all companies. The
OpenChain Project has already achieved and demonstrated a simpler way for
organizations to learn and progress in open source compliance. Standardization
is a way of unifying expectations, and therefore it simplifies processes. We
are excited to leverage our network in Finland to further our joint goals with
OpenChain and help organizations achieve better open source compliance” says
Martin von Willebrand, Partner and Head of Open Technology at HH Partners,
Attorneys-at-law Ltd.
“The key to a successful community is to build great relationships,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “Establishing a formal relationship with HH Partners underlines our pre-existing and fruitful collaboration over many years. Martin and his team have long been a lynchpin of open source legal knowledge in North Europe, and their engagement today is a reflection of how the project and its associated industry standard is gaining momentum.”
About HH Partners
HH Partners, Attorneys-at-law, Ltd, is a Helsinki, Finland based law firm focusing on Technology, Intellectual Property Rights and Transactions. Its Open Technology practice is likely the largest law firm practice on open technologies in Finland.
The link for HH Partners’ English website can be found here:
Double Open
is research project of HH Partners, as a part of 4API project in collaboration
with the University of Helsinki and several other companies. Double Open aims
to enable open open source compliance automation, leveraging existing open
tools and open data. The project is partially funded by Business Finland.
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.
Members of Japan Working Group will introduce activities from our local chapter and sub-groups at OSS/ELC EU Technical Showcase on the 29th of October. Please drop by and say hello!
Dr. Peter Ellsiepen at the European Space Agency (ESA) is kindly hosting a Tooling Work Group meeting at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC). This event marks one of the early opportunities for parties interested in tooling and automation to get together and discuss which open source solutions they are applying to open source compliance.
The Tooling Work Group is chaired by Oliver Fendt from Siemens and has a diverse range of contributors from German, Japanese and international companies.
A new version of the one pager slide was circulated on the mailing list. The objective is to have the first release next week.
Upcoming Events: Oliver presented an overview of the interesting session from an OSS compliance perspective at Eclipsecon. Alexios asked about an overview of the interesting sessions at OSS Summit Europe. Michael J. sent an email with interesting talks at the OSS Summit Europe to the mailing list.
2. Sw360antenna Lars gave an overview about their work concerning automation and integration of the OSS compliance tools in the CI/CD workflow. He introduced two use cases (please see attached slides): 1. Automatic management of 3rd party dependencies This use case applies to “normal” software development, where the OSS component approval is triggered by the integration of the component. 2. Upfront dependency approval This use case applies to software development in regulated environments like safety critical systems, where the OSS components which will be integrated must be known upfront. If an unknown component is detected this will cause a policy violation. Aaron added that this use case is also common in the financial sector.
Lars mentioned that for having an overview about the licensing situation scancode is used and for the curation, approval and release FOSSology is used. He gave a nice live demo showing the working implementation of use case 1. Oliver mentioned that this demo covers the following functional blocks of the big picture: Dependency resolver Source package downloader License & Copyright Scanner Policy Checker Component & application inventory FOSS Compliance Bundle generator
3. Next Steps User stories: Kate mentioned that there is no user story covering the recipients of the compliance artifacts – the persons/organizations receiving the results of the process and results produced by the toolchain. Oliver said that such a user story will be added.
Next meeting: The next regular Wednesday meeting will be on 6th of Nov. On 10th of Oct there is the face to face meeting in Darmstadt
Does your company do open source? It is time to get involved with The Linux Foundation‘s OpenChain Project, the industry standard to make open source compliance quick, easy and efficient. Meet us at Open Source Summit Europe, hop on a call or join our mailing lists. All welcome!
The OpenChain Korea Work Group will hold its fourth meeting on the 2nd of December 2019 between 15:00 and 17:00 at Korea Telecom in Seoul. As always this meeting will be held in Korean and all parties from open source user companies are welcome to attend.
The fifth and sixth meetings have been announced for March and June 2020. Kakao and NCSoft respectively will be the hosts. Please watch this space for more details.
