Sharing and reusing OSS compliance information: The Open Source Curation Database
Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 2pm to 4pm CET

Agenda COOL December 2022 edition:

Description COOL December 2022 edition:

One of the outstanding advantages of Free and Open Source software (FOSS) is certainly the fact that existing components can be adapted and reused. To distribute such software in a product compliantly, the FOSS license conditions have to be observed. Therefore, the first step in any FOSS license compliance process is to determine the applicable licenses so that a component can be cleared for the intended use. To do this, the license information is extracted from the source code and listed. In addition, almost all FOSS licenses require for binary software delivery to also provide license and copyright information separately, making it necessary to extract these data from the source code. Depending on the scope of a project and the size of the FOSS components, extracting these data presents a significant effort which partially cancels out the advantages gained from re-using existing software components. At the same time it seems obvious to organize also these tasks - exactly like the development of the software itself - at least partly in a community. This realization has led to the idea of developing a curation database for FOSS compliance information of commonly used FOSS components and making them publicly available so that such materials can be shared for reuse. Thus, unnecessary parallel work in reaching FOSS license compliance can be avoided in the future.

OSADL is very grateful that Dan-Alexander Levien and Thomas Dulle, both of AUDI AG, as well as Oliver Fendt accepted our invitation as external speakers at this COOL session. In the part "Rationale", Dan-Alexander Levien and Thomas Dulle will recount the genesis and motivation behind the idea of why we need a curation database. In the part "Realization" Oliver Fendt, the creator and maintainer of the database, will then outline the implementation of the curation database community project and dive deeper into the process of creating curated data. In the third talk "USE" Caren Kresse of OSADL will focus on how to use the database and give some examples of how the already available data can help simplify FOSS compliance clearing.

On the occasion of this COOL session, the new project will be publicly launched and the name and logo revealed.

Recommended audience COOL December 2022 edition:

Open Source officers, software developers and engineers, system integrators, employees of internal legal departments, external legal advisors, purchase department employees who deal with Open Source software, employees of QA departments, etc.

About the speakers of the COOL December 2022 edition:

- Thomas Dulle, AUDI AG: Thomas Dulle studied law and political science in Germany and Wales, and subsequently completed his legal traineeship at the Higher Regional Court in Nürnberg and at the European Commission in Brussels. Since 2015, he has been in-house lawyer at AUDI AG, where he deals with legal, technical and business-related issues in his daily practice within an automotive and IT context. In addition to his specialist areas of corporate and IT law, he has also advised on compliance and general business law, among other legal areas. Until 2020, he provided holistic legal advice for an affiliated company in an Audi subgroup. Since then, he has been working with a legal focus in the Open Source software environment and is involved in the project management of a license compliance and management tool.

- Dan-Alexander Levien, AUDI AG: Dan-Alexander Levien has worked as attorney and in-house lawyer at AUDI AG since 2001. Initially, he was mainly in charge of M&A transactions in the tax department. From 2004 onwards, as head of the legal department of an Audi subgroup, he and his team were responsible for providing legal advice to technology companies. Core topics included legal advice in IT and software law as well as corporate and general business law. As part of this, he started early to support the provision of legal advice using particularly developed software. This led to the development of a number of software applications that combine legal and technology aspects and that are successfully used in day-to-day operations. Since 2020, he has been advising as Head of the team “Legal Consulting Innovations” within the legal service of AUDI AG in IT law with a special focus on Open Source software. He is currently the concept creator and product owner of Audi Open Source Diagnostics 2.0 as well as the sponsor of other legal technology initiatives at Audi.

- Oliver Fendt: Oliver Fendt studied telecommunication engineering. After the studies he started his career as a software developer at Siemens. He took several positions as a software developer and project leader. In 2003 he moved on to Siemens Corporate Technology where he became responsible for Open Source license compliance. He has more than 19 years experience in Open Source software, its license conditions and how to comply with the different licenses. During this time, he kicked off several initiatives to reduce the cost of license compliance work. He has profound expertise in all areas of Open Source license compliance.

- Caren Kresse, OSADL: Caren Kresse holds a Master degree in Physics. Already during her studies she used and appreciated the large amount of Open Source software and she became acquainted with all aspects of Open Source communities. In particular, she specialized on legal aspects of conveying Open Source software and has been working on various aspects of Open Source license compliance with OSADL since 2018. Among others, Caren leads the OSADL Open Source Policy project and is deeply involved in the OSADL License Obligations Checklists project. Furthermore, she maintains the OSADL Docker Base Image.

The presentations and video clips of all COOL sessions will be made available after the event. Material of the basic lecture or, in this case, of the first lecture ("Rationale") will be publicly available, material of the advanced lecture or, in this case, of the second ("Realization") and the third ("Use") lecture will be available exclusively for OSADL members or participants with login.

COOL Presentations and video clips (Member or participant login required to display material of the advanced lectures or, in this case, of the second and third lecture)