The Importance of Neutrality

Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) at our member organizations recognize the importance of neutral governance in the projects they choose to take a dependency on for themselves. They also recognize the importance of “doubling down” on engineering investment. 

These organizations typically are past the stage where they want to be strictly consumers of open source software; they’re ready to be participants (hopefully among many) in the actual development process of the software and tools they are using. They ultimately recognize that the ancillary benefits are significant even if the technical vision might change from their internal priorities.

There are clear benefits to having their projects work under an open governance model designed to encourage other organizations to participate and contribute under a “do-ocracy” where the people doing the work make the decisions for the project community. 

A neutral home for projects can bring stability and trust, such as the community not worrying about the parent pulling back the source code or somehow acting against the community’s interests. It also eliminates any distinction between “Commercial Open Source Software,” where some permissions in the software are limited, and fully open versions of the software. 

The TODO Group: OSPO Collaboration

TODO is an open group of organizations that collaborate on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open source projects and programs. TODO Group functions as a community to bring the people managing Open Source Program Offices (OSPO) together in a meaningful way; check out the OSPO Landscape (ospolandscape.org) for some examples, or the OSPO101.org materials found at github.com/todogroup/ospo101.

TODO Group publishes guides on collected best practices from the leading companies engaged in open source development. These guides (todogroup.org/guides) aim to help organizations successfully implement and run an open source program office. The TODO Group also hosted the first OSPOCon in North America and Europe this year.

TODO published its 2021 Annual OSPO Survey results in September. The findings indicated there are many opportunities ahead to educate companies about how OSPOs can benefit them.

OSPO Structure: Professionalization continued among OSPOs, with 58% formally structured programs up from 54% the previous year. Prospects for more funding brightened compared to 2020.OSPO Benefits and Responsibilities: OSPOs had a positive impact on their sponsors’ software practices, but their benefits differed depending on the size of an organization.Organizations without an OSPO: Almost half of the survey participants without an OSPO believed it would help their company, but of those that didn’t think it would help, 35% said they haven’t even considered it.Value of Open Source Participation: 27% of survey participants said a company’s open source participation is at least very influential in their organization’s buying decisions.

FinOps: Cloud Financial Operations‭ ‬

The FinOps Foundation joined the LF’s family of communities in June of 2020. Its mission is to advance the discipline of cloud financial operations (“FinOps”) through best practices, education, and standards among individuals responsible for cloud billing and operations.

The FinOps Foundation includes 4000 individual members worldwide and 40 corporate vendor members, including Google, VMware, Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, and others. In the same way that DevOps revolutionized development by breaking down silos and increasing agility, FinOps increases the cloud’s business value by bringing together technology, business, and finance professionals with a new cultural set, knowledge skills, and technical processes. 

These efforts are made possible by the dozens of enterprises that support the TODO Group and the FinOps Foundation.

To learn how your organization can get involved with TODO Group, click here 

To learn how your organization can get involved with FinOps Foundation, click here 

The post On Neutrality, OSPOs, and an Update on the Linux Foundation’s Best Practices Communities in 2021 appeared first on Linux Foundation.

The global pandemic brought the OpenJS Foundation closer to the end-users and contributors of its hosted JavaScript projects. With more than 97 percent of the world’s websites using JavaScript, it is the foundation for online commerce, economic growth, and innovation.

Following the 25th anniversary of JavaScript, the OpenJS Foundation continues to see an exciting future for the number one programming language, evidenced by the diverse, multi-stakeholder communities that make up OpenJS.

OpenJS is a global community — two years ago, created by the merger of the Node.js and JS Foundations. The OpenJS foundation hosts 38 JavaScript projects, including Node.js, AMP, Electron, jQuery, webpack, Node-RED, and Appium.

OpenJS is a member-supported organization, with companies like IBM, Google, Joyent, Microsoft, GoDaddy, and Netflix, and more providing financial support and active involvement in our governance process.

Netflix has been an end-user and contributor of the Node.js project since 2013 and one of the largest-scale Node.js deployments in production. As platforms grow, so do their needs. However, the core infrastructure is often not designed to handle these new challenges as it was optimized for a relatively simple task. Netflix, a member of the OpenJS Foundation, had to overcome this challenge as it evolved from a massive web streaming service to a content production platform. Netflix runs a serverless Node.js platform that powers all the devices’ user interfaces and use cases for web applications supporting content production.

In 2021 OpenJS welcomed new members: American Express, Bloomberg, Coinbase, NodeXperts, Sentry, and Stream. JavaScript is core to each of these companies’ leadership positions in the market, and by supporting OpenJS, they support the infrastructure and long-term growth of key open source projects on which they rely.

As a global leader in business and financial information, data, news, and analytics, Bloomberg has a long-term investment in JavaScript through contributions to core projects and ongoing participation in standards, notably for the JavaScript language itself. Bloomberg has more than 10,000 frontend apps and tens of millions of lines of JavaScript code that cover both consumer web and the Bloomberg Terminal, the desktop application core to Bloomberg’s business. Furthermore, more than 2,000 software engineers are writing JavaScript at Bloomberg, another testament to the company’s innovation and commitment to the programming language and the open source community.

At OpenJS World 2021, OpenJS Board President Todd Moore, VP of Open Technology and Developer Advocacy at IBM, joined OpenJS Executive Director Robin Ginn for an opening keynote. They described how, through OpenJS, the industry could confidently enter a JavaScript ecosystem that prioritizes stability and openness in the shared technologies while recognizing the unique needs of individual participants.

OpenJS Foundation Executive Director Robin Ginn extended an open invitation: “Our goal at OpenJS is to incubate and sustain a healthy JavaScript ecosystem. To get involved, go to our website at openjsf.org/collaboration. Through your participation, we know the best is yet to come for the future of JavaScript.”

Todd Moore shared why IBM invests in the OpenJS Foundation and why so many of their employees actively participate among OpenJS communities: “IBM and our customers today rely upon many of the open source JavaScript projects hosted at the OpenJS Foundation — it’s in all our economic interests to invest in that technology as it is the plumbing that creates the opportunity for all of us to share in.”

These efforts are made possible by the dozens of enterprises that support the OpenJS Foundation. To learn how your organization can get involved, click here

The post OpenJS Foundation End-of-Year Update appeared first on Linux Foundation.

In 2019, the Linux Foundation added the Joint Development Foundation (JDF) to its family of project communities to build upon its existing body of specification work. The addition of JDF to the Linux Foundation brought with it a unique but straightforward process that allows new projects to form quickly and collaborate under a standardized set of governance principles that ensure the resulting specification can be implemented with open source licenses. 

In 2021, the Linux Foundation has steadily increased interest and new project formation under Linux Foundation Standards (LFS) across various technical disciplines. We have also seen an acceleration of members and contributions in our established projects. 

“2021 can be characterized as a year of progress for LF Standards and JDF. We saw solid operational improvements in our traditional specification efforts, steady uptake on the Community Specification program, and some new wins with the acceptance of the SPDX specification by JTC1. The ability to quickly wrap a specification project with an open source project using well-established governance and standards-making processes seems to have fulfilled an unmet need in our industry,” said Seth Newberry, the General Manager of JDF.

“We reached out to the Linux Foundation because we wanted to create the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA.org) under a simple but formal project structure. Given our project goals of creating technical specifications for countering misleading information online through digital provenance, it was critical to get up and running quickly and with minimal complexity” said Andy Parsons of Adobe Systems. 

“The JDF program is great for us. It has a simple set of templates we used to ensure we employ good standards practices, and it was very quick to set up the legal entity and the project. We’ve also enjoyed excellent support from an experienced team at the Linux Foundation since its inception. We achieved a draft release of the specification in about 8 months, which may be a record in standards-setting. We could not have done this without the LF and JDF.”

Looking ahead, LF Standards expects to become more active and visible in the standards-setting community, especially leveraging the Community Specification as an entry point for new projects that need the established governance and process structure of a traditional standards project but with the low/no-cost project onramp. LF Standards will also begin to fully adapt the investment in project onboarding and reporting tools being developed in LFX, allowing the projects to bring on new contributors quickly, with low overhead, and gain insights about the engagement with the contributors and the progress of the specifications.

An example of the Linux Foundation’s increased standardization efforts has been The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which addresses the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) of media content. C2PA is a Joint Development Foundation project, formed through an alliance between Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic.

C2PA unifies the efforts of the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) which focuses on systems to provide context and history for digital media, and Project Origin, a Microsoft- and BBC-led initiative that tackles disinformation in the digital news ecosystem. C2PA has been active in discussions with legislators, educating policymakers about technical and industry issues surrounding malicious synthetic media.

A public draft of the C2PA specification is currently available for review here.

The most significant improvement to the Linux Foundation Standards offerings is the breadth of options available to companies who want to create technical collaborations that can result in an important public specification. Traditional standards-making organizations are typically technology-specific, created for a specific purpose, and have highly customized bylaws that take time to develop, review and sustain with a bespoke legal entity. 

Linux Foundation Standards have a harmonized set of standardized project charters with compatible governance and process rules that allow contributors to germinate an idea using the free repository-based Community Specification. This can ultimately be matriculated to a compatible traditional-mode standards effort with a formal corporate structure that can hold assets in common and raise funds. All of these efforts can ultimately be submitted to the JTC1/ISO/IEC for consideration and adoption as an internationally recognized standard using the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) process. Additionally, in the spirit of expanding its industry relationships, JDF projects have added new Liaison agreements with standards bodies such as the IPTC, ETSI, SMPTE, and others.

These standardization efforts are made possible by the Joint Development Foundation. To learn how your organization can get involved and form a project, click here

To learn more about and get involved with C2PA, click here

The post Going Beyond Source Code in 2021‭: ‬Joint Development Foundation and Open Standards Efforts appeared first on Linux Foundation.