About the OW2 OSS Good Governance initiative
An OW2 initiative
The bylaws of OW2 define an initiative as "a collaborative activity undertaken to promote a set of technologies from the Association and bring them to the mainstream market. Initiatives shall be used by the Association to make open source middleware widely used in targeted sectors of activity." In a nutshell, it is a joint effort by members and non members to address a market need.
Initiative Status: Operational
Initiative Objective
Most large end-users and systems integrators already use FOSS either in their information systems or in their product and service divisions. Open source compliance has become an ever growing concern and many large companies have named compliance officers.
However, while sanitizing a company’s open source production chain – which is what compliance is about – is fundamental, it is essential that users give back to communities and contribute to the open source ecosystem. This takes compliance to the next level, and this is what open source governance is about. We see open source governance encompassing the whole ecosystem, engaging with local communities, nurturing a healthy relationship with open source software vendors and service specialists.
This initiative goes beyond compliance and liability. It is about building awareness within large end users (who are also often software developers themselves) and systems integrators and developing mutually benefical relationships with the EU OSS ecosystem.
This is what OSS Good Governance is about. And in this area, especially in Europe, everyone is still learning and innovating, with nobody knowing where they really stand regarding the state of the art in the domain.
The initiative is developing an OSS Good Governance Resource Center. It will be organized in five main sections after the Good Governance Maturity model presented at OW2online'20 (video, slides on June 18th; 2020.
Charter
The charter is the foundation document of the initiative. (PDF): .
Slide deck
A couple of slide decks providing an overview of the initiative and a bit of background in the framework of OW2.(PDF, ODP):
Stay in touch with the OSS Good Governance initiative
A mailing list is used to share ideas and information between participants.
How to Contribute
- Create your OW2 user account at https://www.ow2.org/view/services/registration
- Login once at https://www.ow2.org/
- To edit the Resource Center: send us your user name and we'll grant you appropriate access.
- To access the GitLab group: login once to https://gitlab.ow2.org with your OW2 credentials then let us know when it's done and we'll grant you access to the GGI group in GitLab.
- For access to Rocket.Chat you need to:
- Login at least once on https://gitlab.ow2.org using your OW2 credentials.
- Open Rocket.Chat and choose a Rocket.Chat username when prompted.
- Go to the #general channel and ask for GGI channel access there.
- Once access is granted you should be able to access #good-governance channel.
Events and Presentations
Check out the OSS Good Governance initiative session at OW2online'20 on June 18th 9:00 AM CEST. The presentations are all published on the OW2online'20 site: OW2 OSS Good Governance initiative videos and slides, see presentation 25 onward, and here is the programme.
- Cedric Thomas, OW2, Introduction to the OW2 OSS Good Governance initiative
- Michael Jaeger, Siemens, SW360 and fossology – A team for licence compliance
- Boris Baldassari, Castalia, Ideas, methods and tools for OSS Compliance assessment
- Nicolas Toussaint, Orange, Open Source Compliance at Orange
- Oliver Fendt, Siemens, The OpenChain Reference Tooling Work Group - An Overview
- Tobie Langel, Unlockopen, Open source contribution policies that don't suck
- Jose Manrique, Bitergia, Software development at scale: Lessons learned from a pandemic lockdown and open source ecosystems
- Gilles Viton, Orange, Open Source Strategy at Orange France
- Gabriel Ku Wei Bin, FSFE, The NGI0 Initiative: Encouraging Adoption of FOSS Licensing Best Practices
- Gaël Blondelle, Eclipse Foundation's compliance tools
- Cedric Thomas, Closing
- Paris Open Source Summit 2019, Dec 10-11 : Session OSS Governance on December 11, coordinated by OW2.
Agenda and link to presentations (PDF):
- How OSS governance benefits business, Christian Paterson, Orange -
- Measuring the OW2 projects market maturity, Cédric Thomas, OW2 -
- OSS governance and best practices: the MAIF example, François Desmier, MAIF -
- Riding the OSS Governance learning curve, Frederic Aatz, Microsoft -
- InnerSource and open source governance, Florent Zara, Henix -
Initiative Participant Phone Conferences
Phone conferences are organized every month to discuss cooperation actions and move forward with the intiative. The minutes are on the initiative's folder. Online meetingss connection details through the mailing list:
- 27 August 2020, 5:00PM CEST (minutes on the initiative's participant's wiki)
- 29 July 2020, 5:00PM CEST (minutes on the initiative's participant's wiki)
- 25 June 2020, 5:00PM CEST (minutes on the initiative's participant's wiki)
- 28 May 2020, 5:00PM CEST (minutes on the initiative's participant's wiki)
- 23 April 2020, 5:00PM CEST (minutes)
- 26 March 2020, 5:00PM CET (minutes)
- 27 February 2020, 5:00PM CET (minutes)