How can we help you today?
Strategy
Open source brings with it a huge number of benefits, but to realise these effectively requires a clear understanding of how open source can be positioned within your organisation’s value chain and the role it can play in support of your strategy.
Are you looking to leverage open source as a mechanism to capture or grow marketshare, or foster a community of empowered users invested in your products, or reduce license acquisition costs, or attract talents … ?
You may be interested in open source to help create a product or service, or because you are tired of tailoring business to software and instead of the other way around.
Maybe you’re looking at open source as a cultural dynamic to help break down internal silos (inner source) and capitalise skills and passion across teams, or bring your teams closer to your customers, or even to work with other companies.
How you position, leverage and manage open source within your organisation’s digital strategy must support your business, marketing and technical objectives. Open source is a tool, not an ends.
As appropriate to your needs, this service will help you identify:
The right open source strategy for your company, or product.
Key supporting functions and process points (governance, compliance, community, gating criteria …).
Appropriate ecosystem partners, actors and communities.
OSPO
Actors across your organisation should understand when and how they could be impacted by open source. From decisions concerning go-to-market approaches, to questions about R&D pipelines, IP and Standards. From technical development to community interactions, supply chains security, and even RFQ/RFP considerations.
Establishing such understanding and effective working practices across an organisation can be termed governance. This is sometimes coordinated through what is often termed an OSPO - an Open Source Program Office.
Governance can embody a broad range of activities from internal awareness raising and training, to policy recommendations such as gating milestones, or Software Acquisition Management.
Governance also, and critically, lays out the framework within which open source license compliance and risk control can be managed.
This service will help you identify:
The role, aims and functions of an Open Source Governance/OSPO for your company.
The policies that should be enacted by governance and their articulation points with transversal teams such as legal, Standards, purchasing/SAM, etc.
Compliance
Open source is made possible through the mechanism of copyright law. As such, open source license compliance forms an essential part of using, producing and contributing to open source both legally and appropriately.
License compliance often involves several actors, not least:
A project’s technical representatives (lead developer, architect, etc.).
Copyright legal experts.
Patent portfolio managers.
But, there may also be other actors, systems and processes that support good, timely and efficient license compliance. For example, open source experts acting as an interface between projects and a “compliance office”, code scan systems, playbooks, company policies, code publication sites, CLA tracking, etc.
And it should be remembered that ideally licence compliance forms part of a larger, more encompassing risk mitigation approach to open source.
As appropriate to your needs, this service will help you identify:
Open source compliance function(s) for your company and/or product.
Appropriate and pragmatic policies and processes,
Associating tooling.
3rd party legal services (as appropriate).
(Attention: Please note that this service helps establish a compliance function for your company/project. It does not replace the need for legal experts, nor does it provide any legal advice or expertise.)
Community
What is open source without community? Indeed, one could argue that the primary purpose of open source is community; it is intrinsic and fundamental to the very ideals of open source.
How your company fosters, interacts and empowers its open source community (internal or external) depends on factors such as company philosophy, project objectives, go-to-market strategy, supply chain risk mitigation, IPR policies and working culture. There is not a one size fits all approach, even within the same company.
There are huge benefits to creating and building a vibrant, multi-cultural, multi-organisational community that is active and passionate about your product’s success. Indeed, we often consider a company’s position on the open source “maturity curve” as synonymous with how they interact with their community.
As appropriate to your needs, this service will help you identify:
The right community model and macro action plan for your company and/or product.
