NCSOFT is the first global game company to formally announce conformance with ISO/IEC 5230:2020, the International Standard for open source license compliance. It is the second company in Korea to announce conformance to a version of the OpenChain specification after LG Electronics. This historic development underlines the global reach and value of the standard.
ISO/IEC 5230 is maintained by the OpenChain Project as OpenChain 2.1 and edited for ISO via the Joint Development Foundation OpenChain Working Group. ISO/IEC 5230 is supported by Arm, BMW CarIT, Bosch, Cisco, Comcast, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, Hitachi, Microsoft, MOXA, OPPO, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Siemens, Sony, Toshiba, Toyota, Uber and Western Digital as governing board members, and a wide community of companies across three continents.
“The OpenChain Project has a long history in Korea and our local work group has provided great support to the project as we have grown,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain General Manager. “The announcement by NCSOFT today is a superb example of how companies can improve their processes to align with other companies across the market. It makes open source license compliance faster, more effective and more efficient.”
About NCSOFT
NCSOFT is a premiere digital entertainment company and global publisher with worldwide locations and more than 4,000 employees focused on bringing extraordinary games to life for millions of fans around the world. Established in 1997 and headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, we quickly became a key leader in online games. Best known for critically acclaimed franchises including Lineage, Aion, Guild Wars, and Blade & Soul, NCSOFT is also one of the world’s top mobile developers with Lineage 2M occupying the #1 grossing revenue slot on Google Play. Our core goal is making people in this world happier by delivering games that entertain a globally connected audience has remained the same. Our culture is innovative, creative, collaborative and impactful, and we are passionate about creating the best gaming experiences for our players. https://kr.ncsoft.com/en/index.do
About the 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.
