What Is an OSPO?
This paper was translated by Haksung Jang from the English version available at the OSPO Definition. The original document is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Hello!
TODO Group is a group under the Linux Foundation that advocates Talk Openly, Develop Openly, aiming to build successful open source projects and programs through collaboration. TODO Group creates and publishes open source guides, tools, and more, making them available to anyone interested in open source.
For an organization such as a company to effectively manage and use open source, it is said that establishing an OSPOOpen Source Program Office is needed for activities such as developer education, ensuring compliance, engaging with and building community, releasing open source, and code review. This article carries over the article defining what an OSPO is and what role it plays, as written by TODO Group.
Definition of an OSPO
An OSPOOpen Source Program Office is designed to concentrate an organization’s capabilities centrally for the organization’s open source operations. This can include the use, distribution, selection, and inspection of open source and the establishment of related policies, as well as activities that facilitate developer education, ensuring compliance, and engaging with and building community in ways that benefit the organization.
There is no broad template for building an open source program that can be applied across all industries, but here we have classified the general functions of an OSPO into three categories.
- Legal Risk Mitigation
- Improving Engineers’ Practices
- Enabling Financial Benefits
Classifying them into these three categories brings to mind Fear, Love, and Money, respectively.
Legal Risk Mitigation
A company’s primary concern is legal compliance. Accordingly, the OSPO builds and manages the company’s open source license compliance process. Companies that distribute software generally have the most interest in this issue, and it is this legal risk mitigation that most often gets an OSPO started in the first place.
For legal risk management, the OSPO holds the following responsibilities.
- Overseeing open source license compliance management
- Running a review process for the use of inbound codenote: code obtained from external sources such as open source
- Ensuring effective contribution to open source projects
Improving Engineers’ Practices
The OSPO improves engineering functions by providing guides and policies for code management in an open source environment. Companies with many software engineers tend to focus their OSPO on engineering policy and practices.
The OSPO’s responsibilities in this area are as follows.
- Clearly communicating the company’s open source strategy both inside and outside the company
- Fostering an open source culture within the organization
- Ensuring that high-quality code is released to open source communities frequently
Enabling Financial Benefits
Some companies focus on the financial benefits related to open source. They use the OSPO to establish a strategy for whether to use commercial vendors or open source vendors. Meanwhile, some technology companies leverage their own OSPO (and open source projects) to drive customers toward purchasing their commercial products.
The OSPO’s responsibilities in this area are as follows.
- Ownership and oversight of strategy execution
- Promoting the effective use of open source in commercial products and services
- Collaborating with the developer community to encourage adoption of strategic open source projects
In this way, each OSPO is structured to fit the company’s business, products, and goals.
OSPO Guides
TODO Group provides guides for companies to establish and operate an OSPO.
- How to Create an Open Source Program
- Measuring Your Open Source Program
- Tools for Managing Your Open Source Program
OSPO Examples
TODO Group has compiled and published case studies of how companies that make effective use of open source, such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Uber, run their OSPOs.
I close this article by introducing SK telecom’s OSPO: SK telecom OSPO
Thank you.