The Culture of Open Source between Institutions
summary
Companies place OSPOs to handle license compliance and community support — Google created an OSPO in 2004 and maintains about 2500 active projects so lawyers and project teams don’t shoot the company in the foot. Zalando publishes ~200 repos, uses Git and microservices, and runs an open source onboarding training that new hires take. Universities build small centralized teams — one RIT effort drew 50 RSVPs from 37 units and a Sloan-funded team (work begins Jan 25) to help projects launch. Tidelift supplies tooling and paid maintainer support. The Sidewalk Labs Toronto bid’s failure shows governance and data ownership can sink a deployment.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction and panel setup
- 1:28What is an OSPO to you
- 6:26Defining OSPOs at institutions
- 17:06Internal collaboration culture
- 27:43Licenses and community building
- 32:40External collaboration with universities
- 41:11Future of OSPOs in academia
- 47:16OSPOs and smart cities
- 54:20Final thoughts and Q&A
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