Commons Conservancy Contributes Material To The OpenChain Project
SAN FRANCISCO, United States, September 28, 2017 — The Commons Conservancy has contributed a guide to including license information in software source files to the OpenChain Project. This guide, as with all material contributed to the OpenChain Project, is licensed under CC-0.
“This contribution from the Commons Conservancy builds on previous material provided to the OpenChain Project,” says Shane Coughlan, OpenChain Project Director. “It will find a natural home in our expanded curriculum material and supports the sharing of best practices for both manual and automated review. We are immensely grateful to Michiel and the rest of the team at Commons Conservancy for creating excellent knowledge resources and sharing them with a global audience through the OpenChain Project.”
“Licensing and copyright notices in software are typically handled in very much the same way as in the age of Koster and Gutenberg. For all parties that need to deal with them they involve tedious, manual labour – repetitively checking the same data over and over again. This is not only inefficient, but makes it easy to make mistakes,” says Michiel Leenaars, Chairman of the Commons Conservancy. “It is long overdue to automate this antiquated aspect of modern software development. And ironically, keeping stock of this type of information is what computers were created for in the first place. Establishing best practices that show how to do this efficiently, without adding unnecessary complexity, is important for the industry. As the Commons Conservancy we have been gathering and promoting best practices for our projects because we care about the long term manageability of the whole system. We are happy to see Openchain committed to bringing together industry best practices from across the field, and to contribute our work to this initiative.”
The OpenChain Project identifies key recommended processes for effective open source management. The 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.
Organizations of all sizes are invited to review the OpenChain Project, to complete our free Online Self-Certification Questionnaire, and to join our community of trust.
