Executives, experts, analysts, and leaders in open source at some of the world’s largest and most successful companies will speak at the invitation-only Open Source Leadership Summit next month in Lake Tahoe, The Linux Foundation has announced.
AT&T, Cloud Foundry Foundation, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, IDC, Leading Edge Forum, Mozilla, and VMware are among the many organizations that will share insights on how to start, build, participate in and advance open source strategy and development.
The event, set to take place Feb. 14-16, will feature keynotes by Camille Fournier, former CTO of Rent the Runway and author of O’Reilly’s forthcoming book The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change; Dan Lyons, New York Times best-selling author of Disrupted; Donna Dillenberger, IBM Fellow at the Watson Research Center; and entrepreneur William Hurley aka ‘whurley’ whose retirement savings startup Honest Dollar was acquired last year by Goldman Sachs.
Other featured keynotes include:
Katharina Borchert, Chief Innovation Officer, and Patrick Finch, Strategy Director, Mozilla who will discuss community innovation.
Al Gillen, GVP of Software Development and Open Source at IDC, will provide an analysis of open source in 2017 and beyond.
Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, will share how cross-foundation collaboration is a win for open source.
Chris Rice, SVP at AT&T Labs and Domain 2.0 Design and Architecture at AT&T, will talk about the future of networking and orchestration.
And more.
Open Source Leadership Summit is where open source leaders and visionaries come together, share best practices, and get the latest information on open source for business advantage. This conference is the place to be if your business is among the many companies across diverse industries that are discovering the strategic benefits of using open source software and participating in its development.
The event will also feature more than 50 educational sessions covering best practices, the future of open source, leadership strategy, open source project updates, compliance and standards, professional open source management, and more. Attendees can also take part in Open Spaces unconference sessions, pre and post summit activities and evening events geared towards small group collaboration and networking. See the full schedule.
Open source collaboration is a strong economic force that’s transforming diverse industries. No area of technology is untouched. Open Source Leadership Summit is the place to learn how this transformation is happening and how your company can be involved and benefit from it.
How mature is your organization’s open source software management? Take our short sample POSMA (Professional Open Source Management Assessment) survey for a ballpark score. Take the survey!
The Linux Foundation’s new Kubernetes training course is now available for developers and system administrators who want to learn container orchestration using this popular open source tool.
Kubernetes is quickly becoming the de facto standard to operate containerized applications at scale in the data center. As its popularity surges, so does demand for IT practitioners skilled in Kubernetes.
“Kubernetes is rapidly maturing in development tests and trials and within production settings, where its use has nearly tripled in the last eight months,” said Dan Kohn, executive director, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258) is a self-paced, online course that teaches students how to use Kubernetes to manage their application infrastructure. Topics covered include:
Kubernetes architecture
Deployment
How to access the cluster
Tips and tricks
ConfigMaps, and more.
Developed by The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, home of the Kubernetes open source project, developers and admins will learn the technology straight from the source.
Students will learn the fundamentals needed to understand Kubernetes and get quickly up to speed to start building distributed applications that will scale, be fault-tolerant, and simple to manage.
The course distills key principles, such as pods, deployments, replicasets and services, and give students enough information to start using Kubernetes on their own. And it’s designed to work with a wide range of Linux distributions, so students will be able to apply the concepts learned regardless of their distribution of choice.
LFS258 also will help prepare those planning to take the Kubernetes certification exam, which will launch later this year. Updates are planned for the course ahead of the certification exam launch, which will be specifically designed to assist with preparation for the exam.
The course, which has been available for pre-registration since November, is available to begin immediately. The $199 course fee provides unlimited access to the course for one year to all content and labs. Sign up now!
The following is adapted from Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise by Ibrahim Haddad, PhD.
In the past few years, several cases of non-compliance with open source licenses have made their way to the public eye. Increasingly, the legal disposition towards non-compliance has lessons to teach open source professionals. Here are my four top takeaways, gleaned from the years I’ve worked in open source.
1. Ensure Compliance Prior to Product Shipment/Service Launch
The most important lesson of non-compliance cases has been that the companies involved ultimately had to comply with the terms of the license(s) in question, and the costs of addressing the problem after the fact has categorically exceeded those of basic compliance. Therefore, it is really a smart idea to ensure compliance before a product ships or a service launches.
It is important to acknowledge that compliance is not just a legal department exercise. All facets of the company must be involved in ensuring proper compliance and contributing to correct open source consumption and, when necessary, redistribution.
This involvement includes establishing and maintaining consistent compliance policies and procedures as well as ensuring that the licenses of all the software components in use (proprietary, third-party, and open source) can co-exist before shipment or deployment.
To that effect, companies need to implement an end-to-end open source management infrastructure that will allow them to:
• Identify all open source used in products, presented in services, and/or used internally
• Perform architectural reviews to verify if and how open source license obligations are extending to proprietary and third-party software components
• Collect the applicable open source licenses for review by the legal department
• Develop open source use and distribution policies and procedures
• Mitigate risks through architecture design and engineering practices
2. Non-Compliance is Expensive
Most of the public cases related to non-compliance have involved GPL source code. Those disputes reached a settlement agreement that included one or more of these terms:
• Take necessary action to become compliant
• Appoint a Compliance Officer to monitor and ensure compliance
• Notify previous recipients of the product that the product contains open source software and inform them of their rights with respect to that software
• Publish licensing notice on company website
• Provide additional notices in product publications
• Make available the source code including any modifications applied to it (specific to the GPL/LGPL family of licenses)
• Cease binary distribution of the open source software in question until it has released complete corresponding source code or make it available to the specific clients affected by the non-compliance
• In some cases, pay an undisclosed amount of financial consideration to the plaintiffs
Furthermore, the companies whose compliance has been successfully challenged have incurred costs that included:
• Discovery and diligence costs in response to the compliance inquiry, where the company had to investigate the alleged inquiry and perform due diligence on the source code in question
• Outside and in-house legal costs
• Damage to brand, reputation, and credibility
In almost all cases, the failure to comply with open source license obligations has also resulted in public embarrassment, negative press, and damaged relations with the open source community.
3. Relationships Matter
For companies using open source software in their commercial products, it is recommended to develop and maintain a good relationship with the members of the open source communities that create and sustain the open source code they consume. The communities of open source projects expect companies to honor the licenses of the open source software they include in their products. Taking steps in this direction, combined with an open and honest relationship, is very valuable.
4. Training is Important
Training is an essential building block in a compliance program, to ensure that employees have a good understanding of the policies governing the use of open source software. All personnel involved with software need to understand the company’s policies and procedures. Companies often provide such education through formal and informal training sessions.
Learn more in the free “Compliance Basics for Developers” course from The Linux Foundation.
Read the other articles in the series:
An Introduction to Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise
Open Compliance in the Enterprise: Why Have an Open Source Compliance Program?
Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise: Benefits and Risks
3 Common Open Source IP Compliance Failures and How to Avoid Them
