2024-03-05 –, Stage Auditorium
Our definition of OSPOs have largely stayed the same since Sun microsystems establised their OSPO in the 90s - but open source is no longer a fringe activity understood by the few, but a critical part of a companys overall IT strategy - so isn't it time that we change how OSPOs work?
The fundamental concept and purpose of having an open source programme office
has largely stayed the same, since Sun Microsystems launched their OSPO in 1999. The TODOGroup
definition of OSPOs still focuses on centering open source compliance, policies and communities
around an OSPO.
But the world and the criticality of Open Source has dramatically changed the last 25 years, and we
See both a greater maturity inside companies making the OSPO largely unnecessary, as well as bigger
challenges which an OSPO Is not enabled to solve, but should rather be an integral part of the companys
IT strategy as a whole.
Open source is no longer a fringe activity, but something which 97% of companies use, and for the large part is a very critical part of their IT strategy and investment. At the same time the vendor landscape as well as
internal Security, Legal and compliance teams have matured their understanding of open source and no
longer need an OSPO to support them.
So what does the OSPO of the future look like? Is there even a need and a space for such a function?
In this session I will bring in my learnings from 10 years in an open source start up and from establishing OSPOs in 2 of the largest european tech companies and give my view on how OSPOs should position themselves to still be relevant and support open source going forward.
Spend the last 20 years working in Open Source, first as the Co-founder of the most widely used open source content management system in the Microsoft ecosystem (Umbraco) powering over a million websites, then went on to found the OSPO teams in Zalando and Spotify.
Currently works as Director of developer relations at the open source company Docker.