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Congratulations Fukuchi San!

By Featured, News

Fukuchi San of Sony, one of the key people behind the OpenChain Japan Work Group, has received the ‘NAOPF OSS award 2022‘ from the Japan OSS Promotion Forum. This award was announced on the 24th of November 2022 during the 20th Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum.

Fukuchi San is one of the founders of the OpenChain Japan Work Group and has been a tireless contributor to both the local and international community for many years. His formal resume is on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hiroyuki-fukuchi-oss/) but his most important resume is visible across his community contributions on our calls, mailing lists and elsewhere.

The OpenChain Project is driven by the community around it, and figures like Fukuchi San have been critical to building the energy and atmosphere to help people work together. His award is well-deserved and is a welcome example of how contributions are acknowledged by the broader open source ecosystem.

Thank you Fukuchi San!

Learn More (Japanese):

  • http://ossforum.jp/index.php/2022/11/18/2022naospf/

OpenChain Export Control Work Group – 2022-11-22 – Full Recording

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The first meeting of the OpenChain Export Control Work Group took place on the 22nd of November 2022. This meeting focused on setting the parameters for future discussion.

In our open discussion, we explored topics firstly by framing the challenges, and then by discussing the types of resources available to support individual organization understanding and workflow.

During this discussion we explored a series of links based on audience contribution.

For example, the US export control overview:

The US Encryption and Export Administration Regulations (EAR):

The type of definitions used:

The American Conference Institute overview of US EAR encryption controls:

Exclusions to US cryptographic export control related to financial services:

A recent article regarding open source and export control:

An old but potentially useful (especially if refreshed) list of export controls by country:

An example of cryptography detected by the tool SCANOSS Minr:

We have decided to reach out to experts to see if there are other resources available that may be useful.

Two future resources flagged as useful are:

  1. A list of tools to help detect cryptographic algorithms in open source.
  2. A document listing what encryption is strong and what is standard.

Our outcome was to search for resources like this, and also to check the type of parameters that our work group could continue the discussion while ensuring everyone is comfortable and no suggestion of organizational advice or recommendations could be misunderstood as existing.

The OpenChain Export Control Work Group will hold its second meeting on the 13th of December at 09:00 PST (17:00 UTC).

This meeting will have the following agenda:

  1. Introductions
  2. Open discussion about how our community can contribute to the field

Zoom meeting: 

OpenChain Specification Chair – Election Results

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The OpenChain Project ran an election for co-chairs of the Specification Work Group. The election period was from 2022-11-16 until 2022-11-22 Close of Business UTC.

The Nominees

The Results

Helio received the majority of votes for the licensing co-chair.
Chris received the majority of votes for the security co-chair.

Conclusion: Helio and Chris will be passed as recommendations to the OpenChain Governing Board, who are meeting on the 8th of December. After this the new Specification Chair(s) will be announced.

Congratulations to everyone who was nominated. Each candidate is a valued member of our community and has played a significant role in our success. We look forward to continuing to work together closely as the project evolves. The results of this vote should not be viewed as a popularity contest, but rather a snapshot of community perspectives at this moment in time. As always, we rely on ALL of you to be the foundation and the driver of our specification work.

Thanks to everyone who voted. Your time was deeply appreciated. We will be holding our next election in one year, and we look forward to your participation at that time as well.

Details of the Election:

We received 13 votes in total.

Licensing

  • Helio Chissini de Castro received 7 Votes
  • Steve Kilbane received 6 Votes

Security

  • Chris Wood received 10 Votes
  • Jacob Wilson received 3 Votes

More Details About How The Election Worked

How we are running this election is split into two lengthy descriptions below. We are striving to do two things:

  1. Create an open election process
  2. Address the potential we have to have multiple domain experts sharing work

Because this is our first major election for Specification Chair, the process may have some rough edges. If there are any critical issues, we will address them.

How We Ran The Elections

The OpenChain Governing Board is formally considering who should be appointed by the board for the position(s) of OpenChain Specification Chairperson, and invites the broader OpenChain community to provide their perspective.

In this process, the broader OpenChain community will have nominees proposed and voted on to provide a recommendation. That recommendation will be passed to the OpenChain Governing Board for review, approval and ratification at their next meeting.

The specific process on behalf of the community is to undertake a voting process after a period of nomination. The community will vote in the following manner:

Votes for chairpeople will be sent by email to operations@openchainproject.org(received by the OpenChain General Manager and Project Manager).

Each member of our specification@ can cast *one* vote. All members of main@ are entitled to join specification@. The requirement to join the specification list is to maintain that list as the “single source of truth” for our specification-editing and other core specification work.

The votes will be tallied by the General Manager and prepared for the OpenChain Governing Board to review.

The tally will be reported to the OpenChain governing board. Their feedback and final decision will be provided to the community-at-large after their next formal governing board meeting.

For the 2022 OpenChain Specification Work Group elections the following notes are provided:
(1) we are operationally splitting the specification work group into two work groups: licensing and security, reflecting our two specifications in-market.
(2) for *this* specific election, we will split the election into two threads: one license biased (two nominees) and one security biased (two nominees). The result will be two chairs to fill the co-chair positions after approval by the OpenChain Governing Board.
(3) this means everyone on specification@ should vote for:
(i) their preferred choice for license work group chair;
(I) their preferred choice for security work group chair.
(4) these votes may be cast between the 16th and 22nd of November 2022.
(5) the OpenChain Governing Board will receive the tally of votes expressing community feedback, and will review it formally at their next meeting on the 8th of December 2022.
(6) it is expected that at this juncture the community will receive a response from the OpenChain Governing Board regarding their decision(s) around specification chairperson(s) circa 9th December 2022, and our new specification chairs will begin their term of office prior to 2023.

This process may be adjusted at any time by the governing board, and feedback to improve the process is always welcome, with the optic of ensuring that we continually refine the process as time progresses.

For This Specific Election

For the nomination period, we happen to have two people well versed in license compliance (Steve and Helio) and two people with a security background (Jacob and Chris). This suggest that our co-chair election – for *this* specific election, should break into two threads: one license biased (two nominees) and one security biased (two nominees). The result will be two chairs to fill the co-chair positions after approval by the OpenChain Governing Board.

However, for clarity, the intent is not to split the development of our licensing and security specifications into two different paths. The intent is that both chairs will work on both specifications by helping to collect community feedback and so on, with this feedback being provided to the Steering Committee for formal review and ratification if and when we decide to produce new versions of our standards.

OpenChain Public Policy Work Group – First Meeting December 12th 2022

By Featured, News

We will meet at 08:00 UTC (09:00 CET) on Monday the 12th of December. Everyone is invited, whether they are from a company, governmental organization, non-governmental organization, academic organization or interested as an individual.

The agenda for our first meeting will be:

  1. Introductions
  2. An overview of open source public policy concerns in Europe and Asia
  3. Open discussion on next steps

Ahead of the meeting you are encouraged to join our public policy work group mailing list:

Our second meeting will be scheduled around one month later at a timezone suitable for our colleagues in North America, and will be designed to capture their policy concerns as we head into 2023.

OpenChain Specification Chair Election Period Now Open

By Featured, News

The OpenChain Project is running an election for co-chairs of the Specification Work Group. The election period is from today (2022-11-16) until 2022-11-22 Close of Business UTC.

Here are our current nominees:

Everyone is invited to vote for their preferred chairs. Here is how:

  1. You have two votes.
  2. One is licensing focused (Steve or Helio) and one is security focused (Jacob or Chris).
  3. You can vote by (a) signing up to our Specification mailing list (because this mailing list is our single source of truth for specification work) and (b) sending an email to operations@openchainproject.org with the subject “Specification Chair Elections” and the following content:

My name is NAME and my votes are as follows:
NAME for licensing
NAME for security
Regards
YOUR NAME

Some notes:

  1. The email address ending your vote must be subscribed to the specification mailing list.
  2. Any vote not provided in this format will be invalid.
  3. You can vote for yourself.
  4. You can only submit your votes once.

More Details

How we are running this election is split into two lengthy descriptions below. We are striving to do two things:

  1. Create an open election process
  2. Address the potential we have to have multiple domain experts sharing work

Because this is our first major election for Specification Chair, the process may have some rough edges. If there are any critical issues, we will address them.

How We Are Running The Elections

The OpenChain Governing Board is formally considering who should be appointed by the board for the position(s) of OpenChain Specification Chairperson, and invites the broader OpenChain community to provide their perspective.

In this process, the broader OpenChain community will have nominees proposed and voted on to provide a recommendation. That recommendation will be passed to the OpenChain Governing Board for review, approval and ratification at their next meeting.

The specific process on behalf of the community is to undertake a voting process after a period of nomination. The community will vote in the following manner:

Votes for chairpeople will be sent by email to operations@openchainproject.org(received by the OpenChain General Manager and Project Manager).

Each member of our specification@ can cast *one* vote. All members of main@ are entitled to join specification@. The requirement to join the specification list is to maintain that list as the “single source of truth” for our specification-editing and other core specification work.

The votes will be tallied by the General Manager and prepared for the OpenChain Governing Board to review.

The tally will be reported to the OpenChain governing board. Their feedback and final decision will be provided to the community-at-large after their next formal governing board meeting.

For the 2022 OpenChain Specification Work Group elections the following notes are provided:
(1) we are operationally splitting the specification work group into two work groups: licensing and security, reflecting our two specifications in-market.
(2) for *this* specific election, we will split the election into two threads: one license biased (two nominees) and one security biased (two nominees). The result will be two chairs to fill the co-chair positions after approval by the OpenChain Governing Board.
(3) this means everyone on specification@ should vote for:
(i) their preferred choice for license work group chair;
(I) their preferred choice for security work group chair.
(4) these votes may be cast between the 16th and 22nd of November 2022.
(5) the OpenChain Governing Board will receive the tally of votes expressing community feedback, and will review it formally at their next meeting on the 8th of December 2022.
(6) it is expected that at this juncture the community will receive a response from the OpenChain Governing Board regarding their decision(s) around specification chairperson(s) circa 9th December 2022, and our new specification chairs will begin their term of office prior to 2023.

This process may be adjusted at any time by the governing board, and feedback to improve the process is always welcome, with the optic of ensuring that we continually refine the process as time progresses.

For This Specific Election

For the nomination period, we happen to have two people well versed in license compliance (Steve and Helio) and two people with a security background (Jacob and Chris). This suggest that our co-chair election – for *this* specific election, should break into two threads: one license biased (two nominees) and one security biased (two nominees). The result will be two chairs to fill the co-chair positions after approval by the OpenChain Governing Board.

However, for clarity, the intent is not to split the development of our licensing and security specifications into two different paths. The intent is that both chairs will work on both specifications by helping to collect community feedback and so on, with this feedback being provided to the Steering Committee for formal review and ratification if and when we decide to produce new versions of our standards.

OpenChain Monthly Meeting 2022-11-15 (Asia and USA) – Full Recording

By Featured, News

On this call we live-edited two suggestions for future versions of our license compliance and security assurance standards. In addition, we covered all the latest news in our space, and discussed how we can continually improve our collaboration with other projects doing related work. See the full recording and review the slide deck below.

The live-edited suggestion related to the licensing standard:
https://github.com/OpenChain-Project/License-Compliance-Specification/issues/59

The live-edited suggestion related to the security standard:
https://github.com/OpenChain-Project/Security-Assurance-Specification/issues/9

New OpenChain Public Policy Work Group

By Featured, News

The OpenChain Project has a mission to build trust in the supply chain and a focus on issues related to open source licensing, security and related topics. We maintain an ISO/IEC process standard for open source license compliance, a de facto process standard for Security Assurance, and we have a huge library of reference and training material.

To ensure that people working in the sphere of public policy can access our community knowledge (and to ensure our community can access their knowledge), we are starting a Public Policy Work Group. We will meet every few months via Zoom to discuss developments in overarching open source policy around the world.

Everyone is invited to be part of this and to contribute their experience. Our goal is to keep everyone informed of key developments, provide a space to discuss best practices, and – ultimately – to help further our mission to make a trusted open source supply chain that spans the world.

Join the Public Policy Work Group mailing list to get started:

(or just send a subscription email to public-policy-wg+subscribe@lists.openchainproject.org)

We will announce our first event in the coming weeks. It is provisionally scheduled for early December.

OpenChain Automotive Mini-Summit 2022 – Full Recording

By Featured, News

The OpenChain Automotive Work Group held a mini-summit on the 11th of November 2022. This event was focused on outlining the key items of interest for the industry in our sphere, and then discussing how we will address them in 2023. It was a short summit (only one hour) so time was tight, and it is clear that we have plenty to do as we begin regular quarterly meetings circa February 2023.

You can contact us and also contribute to all our activities via the OpenChain Automotive Work Group mailing list:
https://groups.io/g/openchain-automotive-work-group

Security Assurance Self-Certification Questionnaire Now Available in Simplified Chinese

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The self-certification questionnaire for OpenChain Security Assurance Reference Specification 1.1 is now available in Simplified Chinese:

This was contributed by Feng Wang from SecTrend, and it joins our previous contribution of a self-certification checklist in Simplified Chinese from Zhang Jun Xia at CAICT:

Both documents can be used to adopt our Security Assurance Specification by any company of any size.

OpenChain Webinar #45 – The Software Defined Vehicle Project – 2022-11-29

By Featured, News

In our 45th OpenChain Webinar, Michael Plagge from Eclipse will introduce the Software Defined Vehicle Project and explain more about what it means to open source in automotive and the broader global community. This has the potential to have a significant impact in a market-sector supply chain and is recommended watching for those operating in the space.

You can join us at 08:00 UTC (09:00 CET) on the 29th of November 2022. We will be using this Zoom room: