More than a couple of decades into the OSPO movement, the role of the OSPO and similar open source initiatives have grown to become a central source of expertise and a strong voice in developing and implementing technology strategy at the world’s forward-thinking companies. The TODO Group, in collaboration with Linux Foundation Research, is pleased to release a new whitepaper, The Evolution of the Open Source Program Office. We hope this work provides guidance and a way to better frame and visualize the OSPO ecosystem complexity and provide a roadmap to ease OSPO planning and adoption
The Evolution of OSPOs provides a set of patterns and directions, as well as a checklist, to help implement an OSPO or an open source initiative within corporate environments. This includes an OSPO maturity model, practical implementation from noted OSPO programs across regions and sectors, and a handful of broad OSPO archetypes, which drive differentiation in OSPO behavior.
To gain more qualitative insights into how OSPOs were evolving, we interviewed leaders of noted OSPO programs, including some of the most influential technology firms, such as Red Hat, Microsoft, and VMware, as well as some of the most iconic transportation brands and one of the largest media and entertainment companies. Also, people will be able to learn from different OSPO case studies in three different sectors (media, financial services, and transportation) each case is structured as a journey through the stages of the OSPO.
We welcome the open source community to contribute and collaborate to these resources, expanding the initial archetype scope or improving the documentation for each of the stages. Everyone is welcome to join our TODO work day calls or present new ideas and discussions for upcomming OSPOlogy community meetings. People can also open a new discussion in the OSPO forum.We are open!
Last but not least, big thanks to the sponsors and to all the participants in this study who generously spent time speaking with us and reviewing sections of the report:
- Nithya Ruff (Comcast)
- Deborah Bryant (RedHat)
- Chris Xie (Futurewei Technologies, Inc.)
- Dirk Riehle (University of Erlangen)
- Kevin Fleming (former at Bloomberg)
- Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg)
- Stormy Peters (former at Microsoft)
- Suzanne Ambiel (VMWare)
- Nik Peters (Porsche)
- Michael Picht (SAP)
- Peter Giese (SAP)
This report would not have been possible without Alex Salkever, who skillfully led the research and writing effort, and TODO Group’s Ana Jiménez Santamaría, for helping with project design and outreach.
Last but not least, we would also like to thank Comcast, Bloomberg, and Porsche for their help and advice in the whitepaper’s case studies, as well as VMware for its sponsorship of this research.