With all the buzz around SBOMs and Open Source supply chain compliance and security, a new revolution is igniting at ClearlyDefined. This amazing project has been flying under the radar since its inception six years ago, but now this free service and open source project from the Open Source Initiative (OSI) gets cleared for takeoff with the launch of a new website focused on stellar documentation, excellent engineering, and healthy community growth.

Read more: https://opensource.org/blog/unveiling-clearlydefined-this-free-sbom-service-gets-cleared-for-takeoff

As a community manager, I find FOSS Backstage to be one of my favorite conferences content-wise and community-wise. This is a conference that happens every year in Berlin, usually in early March. It’s a great opportunity to meet community leaders from Europe and across the world with the goal of fostering discussions around three complementary perspectives: a) community health and growth, b) project governance and sustainability, and c) supply chain compliance and security.

Read more: https://opensource.org/blog/three-perspectives-from-foss-backstage

Once again Bosch’s campus in Berlin received ORT Community Days, the annual event organized by the OSS Review Toolkit (ORT) community. ORT is an Open Source suite of tools to automate software compliance checks.

The ClearlyDefined community had an important presence at the event, represented by E. Lynette Rayle and Lukas Spieß from GitHub and Qing Tomlinson from SAP. I had the pleasure to represent the Open Source Initiative as the community manager for ClearlyDefined. The mission of ClearlyDefined is to crowdsource a global database of licensing metadata for every software component ever published. We see the ORT community as an important partner towards achieving this mission.

Read more: https://opensource.org/blog/clearlydefined-at-the-ort-community-days

At the beginning of 2023, I started as a community manager for ClearlyDefined, with the goals of creating an open governance model for the project and helping the OSI to establish a neutral infrastructure to foster collaboration among multiple stakeholders. Thanks to the amazing work from our community members, a lot of progress has been made in 2023, but there’s still a lot of work ahead of us. In this post, we would like to highlight some milestones achieved this past year and acknowledge some individuals who have contributed to the project. We would also like to share a vision for 2024 and invite all organizations who care about the Open Source supply chain to become involved.

Read more: https://opensource.org/blog/clearlydefined-recapping-a-year-of-progress-and-sharing-a-vision-for-2024

The 2023 report of the licenses in use by the biggest package managers highlights the need to educate developers on the importance of licensing information. While many developers know that Open Source software forms the backbone of modern development, the data shows that much of their software is shared (and most likely also used) without a license.

Read more: https://opensource.org/blog/the-most-popular-licenses-for-each-language-2023