Keynote speakers included Megan Smith, former U.S. CTO and assistant to the President; Jon “maddog” Hall, board chair for the Linux Professional Institute; and Douglas Crockford, author of the data format JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was kindly invited to present the “25 years of Open Source.” As community manager at the OSI, I gave an overview of the rich and interconnected history of both the Free Software and Open Source movements, and later looked towards the future to reimagine a new world where openness and collaboration prevail. In my presentation I explored the challenges and opportunities ahead, including Open Source’s key role in fostering collaboration and innovation in emerging areas such as AI/ML.

One of the high points of the conference was the keynote from Megan Smith: “Accelerating solution making through inclusion.” Megan shared her vision for a more productive, innovative, multi-disciplinary and positively-impactful technology community that accomplishes this mission through including and building for all of humanity. Openness and inclusion were a big focus of her presentation, where she highlighted how Open Source, open collaboration, open innovation, open education and open government can help bring different people and perspectives together.

Sysarmy organized several social and inclusive activities as part of Nerdearla. The event adopted a hybrid approach, where participants who could not attend in person were able to watch the presentations and interact with others online. Kids were also invited to be part of the conference by participating in activities like the Roboteam experience. 

While technology was the main focus of the event, adjacent topics like mathematics and astronomy were also incorporated into the program, including a “night at the planetarium.” Finally, there was also a special “women in technology” social event where both new and experienced participants could share their experiences with other colleagues.

In my opinion, Nerdearla is one of the best conferences in the world with a vibrant community. The event relies solely on sponsors and tickets are 100% free for attendees, who gain the opportunity to learn from top class speakers. Please visit: https://nerdear.la/

After years of observing the evolution of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) among members of the TODO Group, we’ve identified common patterns and summarized them in a shared framework. There are five common stages of the OSPOs that identify the status of your organization’s involvement in Open Source: use it as suggestions to advance your Open Source journey. This article is a companion to What is an OSPO and why you need one.

A walk through the different stages of an OSPO

To better explain the evolution of OSPOs, members from the TODO Group run an annual OSPO survey and propose a maturity model you can use for your organization. This model serves as a framework to understand the stages of an OSPO and thus identify where the organization is in terms of open source involvement and help them advance into a more mature adoption:

This model is composed of two variables and four stages:

• Y variable: Ability to execute
• X variable: OSPO level
• Stage 1: Legal driven
• Stage 2: Community driven
• Stage 3: Engagement driven
• Stage 4: Leadership driven

Stage 0: Adopting Open Source ad-hoc

Almost all organizations use Open Source, although how they adapt and use it varies. They may use it as a building block or library in a product or tool or as a key part of a vendor’s product stack or support the vendor’s service offering. Modern cloud-native applications, almost by default, use Open Source systems for container orchestration, observability, data storage, messaging, and more.

 However, the very earliest form of adoption is ad hoc, by developers solving problems using readily available tools and technologies. This “ad -hoc adoption” usually means little thought is given to license compliance outside the defaults or to longer-term impacts of consuming Open Source and distributing products built with Open Source components.

Stage 1 (Legal driven): Providing Open Source compliance, inventory, and developer education

In general, an organization forms an OSPO when it realizes that its people are consuming Open Source products and code across nearly all engineering and development departments and functions. This usage is typically internal, not part of products or services to customers or users. At this early stage, organizations often use many different names for the OSPO. IBM initially called its programmatic Open Source efforts the “Open Source Steering Committee” as an example.

Organizations in stage 1 recognize that Open Source is a key part of their business and technology strategy. They understand that the security practices of Open Source projects differ from those of proprietary software companies.

Organizations must identify their legal and security risks. Risk mitigation strategies include:

• Careful licensing
• Developer education
• Inventory taking

Stage 2 (Community driven): Evangelizing Open Source use and ecosystem participation

Early period

After organizations recognize the value of Open Source and the need for compliance, education, and a Software Bill of Material (SBOM), they begin to realize the economic benefits of Open Source usage and seek to expand it. OSPOs in stage 2 create such internal mechanisms as ambassadors who promote usage of approved Open Source products, educational programs on good hygiene, and technical training or tuition reimbursement for skill building and certifications in Open Source. With these initiatives, an organization can grow its use of Open Source and amplify its message that it’s not only important but desirable and preferable to proprietary software products.

Growth period

As advancing in this stage, organizations begin incentivizing their developers to work on OSS projects critical to their operations, to the degree that developers become highly active contributors or primary maintainers.

• OSPOs begin to streamline and optimize open outbound source contributions for their developers.
• OSPOs create and launch open source projects to establish broad credibility in the open source community

Stage 3 (Engagement driven): Hosting Open Source projects and growing communities

At stage 3, organizations initiate and then host or act as primary sponsors of Open Source projects. They will dedicate one or more full time employees to a project, and they accept responsibility for nurturing a project community, ensuring its health. They don’t confuse this level of organizational commitment with individual employees who decide to open source their projects. In this stage, organizational leaders support incubating and launching projects into the public sphere because they understand how they benefit their organization. Such projects tend to offer better performance and economics on crucial capabilities that may be non-core to the organization’s value proposition but critical to its technology infrastructure.

This is the stage where the OSPO develops processes, playbooks and tools to vet, organize, and operate Open Source projects and to prepare and coach their leaders.

Stage 4 (Leadership driven): Becoming a strategic decision-making Partner

At this maturity stage, the OSPO becomes a strategic partner for technology decisions, helping to guide choices and shape long-term commitments to projects. The CTO and other technology leaders consult the OSPO and its leadership on which Open Source technologies to rely on and which decision criteria to use in judging projects. Because major technology choices tend to generate significant secondary and tertiary costs and affect upstream and downstream technologies as well as hiring plans, the choice of Open Source projects becomes a major business decision.

The OSPO becomes a strategic partner for technology decisions, helping to guide choices and shape long-term commitments to projects. The OSPO evolves to offer strategic guidance:

• Advises the CTO and technology leadership on Open Source technologies to adopt/remove from the organization’s technology stack
• Take the lead on benchmarking what constitutes an acceptable Open Source project
• Help organizations understand and navigate project politics

The rise of the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) roughly mirrors the proliferation of Open Source software to build and run the most important technology applications within organizations in the world today. A well-designed OSPO is the center of competency for an organization’s Open Source operations and structure. Its role can include setting code use, distribution, selection, auditing, and other policies, as well as training developers, ensuring legal compliance, and promoting and building community engagement that benefits the organization strategically.

The Evolution of the OSPO: from tech giants’ resources to a worldwide adopted open source best practice

The OSPO concept is now about two decades old but really started to accelerate in the last decade or so, spreading beyond the boundaries of technology firms. Nowadays companies like Amazon, Google, VMware, Cisco, Goldman Sachs, Porsche, Aiven are encouraging their employees to contribute to Open Source projects that are strategic to their business and security. Initially focused on license compliance in the early days, the OSPO often plays a broader role inside organizations today.

OSPOs serve to educate developers and other employees about Open Source by fostering best practices and participation in communities to make developers more efficient. Over time, OSPOs have evolved from engaging in existing projects to generating and launching projects to the broader community. Upper-level management is more likely to acknowledge the crucial role that Open Source technologies play in accelerating innovation and sharing software development costs across multiple beneficiaries.

The formation of OSPOs can be analogous to when organizations first started to establish Chief Information Security Officer positions (CISO) as a reaction to security incidents. The organizations that established these centers of security competency protected and armed themselves for a better future. Those who did not, suffered the consequences of poor security practices with negative financial impact.

When you should start an OSPO

Chances are, your organization may already have an OSPO although under a different name. Depending on the organization’s industry, size, values, or even the region where it’s established at, it may be known as FOSS Center of Competence like at Mercedes-Benz or Open Source Programme Office at the World Health Organization.

Starting an Open Source Program office means moving from open source ad-hoc to adopting a strategic posture around open source. If your organization is not there yet, we recommend reading “How to convince your manager to start an OSPO” or taking a look at the different responsibilities to better explain to managers the mission of the OSPO.

Crucial characteristics and responsibilities of an OSPO

According to the Evolution of the OSPO study conducted by the Linux Foundation, any function calling itself an OSPO likely indicates that the organization has reached a maturity stage and critical mass where its OSPOs share key characteristics:

• Employees or teams are tasked with fostering and nurturing OSS usage.
• The organization has a formal policy around the use and production of OSS.
• Decision-makers and recognize that OSS and open source more broadly are important strategic assets.
• Significant numbers of employees or teams are contributing code to open source projects.
• Processes, procedures, and tools are in place to streamline and facilitate open source consumption and participation.

OSPO responsibilities vary depending on many factors, such as the organization size, industry, or culture but overall, the OSPO mind map can help you identify all different topics an OSPO can potentially take care of within an organization.

As the world shifts from proprietary software to Open Source everywhere, the role of the OSPO will grow in importance. The expectation of a successful OSPO will transition from educating developers or marshaling code contributions to adding meaningful strategic value and driving higher level Open Source strategy, innovation, and developer efficiency.

This post is in support of the Open Apereo Conference, on June 14 and 15.

Grant money is pouring in to support institutions of higher education that are taking a strong position in the adoption of Open Source technologies. 82% of enterprise IT leaders are choosing to work with Open Source vendors, and higher education is stepping up and following suit. In order to stay competitive, campuses must take a critical look at how they manage IT portfolios and seriously consider a larger commitment to their own Open Source strategy.

It’s not like Open Source is something new in higher ed. Institutional infrastructure, research, teaching and learning, and student projects have long been supported by Open Source software. And of course, there are even multiple examples of universities starting and successfully delivering Open Source tools. But what we’re noticing is Open Source being deployed across a broader span of departments on campuses. It used to be that when a particularly “innovative” faculty member or department discovered an Open Source solution to address their unique academic programs, research initiatives, or administrative needs, the support and maintenance responsibilities fell chiefly on them. But the broader impact of these solutions raises some questions:

– Want to offer virtual office hours to students? Ask the department’s administrative assistant to send out Jit.si links. But what happens when those Jit.si rooms require more seats?

– Need a database for the lab? Have a grad-student set up PostgreSQL. But where do researchers go when they need more computing power?

– Looking to track the dental school alumni? Rent a little space with a CiviCRM provider. But who is going to help integrate the dental school alumni with the main university alumni association?  

As noted above, Open Source is everywhere. Benefits such as TCO, the pace of development, security, higher quality, cloud-native, and standards-based/setting are enabling teaching and learning in and across academic disciplines. As an instrument in the laboratory supporting cross-institutional research, Open Source delivers substantial  value. As a forum for community engagement driving alumni involvement and fund-raising, Open Source is coming out from “under the desk” independent projects to campus-wide adoption.

With that, the creation of the “Open Source Program Office” (OSPO) is an emerging trend in higher ed. These campuses/programs are all recent initiatives, and they all received significant funding to manage systems and services. Examples include:

Johns Hopkins University (JHU)

• Announcement: Hopkins OSPO, ‘Impactful Open Source’JHU OSPO website
• JHU OSPO website
• Grant information: $350,000

Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)

• Announcement: RIT creates Open@RIT, a university-wide initiative for all things open
• RIT OSPO website
• Grant award: $500,000

The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC)

• Announcement: Sloan Foundation funds two-year pilot open source program office at UC Santa Cruz
• UCSC OSPO website
• Grant award: $700,000

The University of Vermont (UVM)

• Announcement: Open (Source) Road UVM’s VERSO Receives Significant Support from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• UVM OSPO website
• Grant award: $570,000

University of Saint Louis

• Announcement: Grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Will Establish Saint Louis University Open-Source Software Center
• SLU OSPO Website (in development)

• Grant award: $700,000

Leaders in higher ed are recognizing that Open Source provides technical and financial benefits, while the open source values of community, collaboration, and co-creation support the operational, cultural, and educational models being fostered on campus. The management of IT portfolios is changing; vendors vs. projects, contractors vs. collaborators, top-down vs. bottom-up decision making, and centralized vs. distributed services. This warrants a new look at how an open source initiative should be managed and implemented for the greatest impact.

In order for this shift in systems and culture to be successful, institutions need to take this initiative beyond the IT department alone and engage the entire campus community.

• IT departments will need new processes for identifying and evaluating open source options and support providers.
• Procurement departments will need new tools beyond traditional RFPs for software and technology acquisition.
• IP transfer and legal departments should be knowledgeable on matters that affect license compatibility and compliance.
• Campus leadership must adapt to decentralized and distributed decision-making.
• Faculty, researchers, and even students will need to learn how to authentically engage with open source communities of practice.

Broader management (and management skills) are required to leverage open source software, as end-users and as contributors, in higher ed. OSPOs are the way many campuses are doing just that. There are many technology models to follow, and granting institutions are supporting the creation of campus OSPOs to the tune of millions of dollars. It’s an initiative leaders in higher education should educate themselves on in order to participate in this growing trend.

The Apereo Foundation is holding the Open Apereo Conference on June 14 and 15. Last year, we invited Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Research Data Management and Head of the Open Source Programs Office at Johns Hopkins University, to introduce the higher ed OSPO. This year we’re following up with two featured speakers, Stephen Jacobs, Director of Open@RIT, who will speak on the values “in” Open Source that extend and enhance academia, and Danese Cooper, former head of Open Source at Sun, Intel, and PayPal on the value of Open Source Program Offices in higher education.

I suspect they will offer deeper and broader opinions on why campuses are now exploring and launching OSPOs and why granting agencies are funding them. I invite you to join us (register here).

Recently, Libre Space Foundation, on behalf of the OpenSatCom.org activity of the European Space Agency, partnered with Inno3 to investigate open source development models in the satellite communications industry and share their findings in a report. As the authors explain, “..the SATCOM industry has been traditionally multiple vertical ecosystems and moved towards some standardization (through efforts like CCSDS, ECSS, DVB, etc.) on various of its parts. Yet it is far from an Open Ecosystem and specific actions should be taken to explore this direction for the benefit of the SATCOM industry.”

The publicly available report first offers a general overview of open source business models and then explores open source development methods in the context of specific industries/ecosystems:

• The Linux kernel
• GIS
• Automotive
• Terrestrial communications, including Virtual Radio Access Networks
• Telecom

The report suggests most relevant open source models for each of seven different domains of the SATCOM industry (see figure at right).

In addition, the report links to an inventory of 78 existing open source software, hardware and specification projects relevant to the satellite communications.

Space is yet another domain where open source software, hardware and standards are very relevant and where the collaboration allowed by open source licenses will allow for faster progress of science. We applaud and support LSF’s efforts to expand the benefits of open source to those exploring the final frontier.