The NREN Community has long been involved in the development, use and funding of Open Source Software. Previous and ongoing initiatives include:
- SIG-Greenhouse, which lead to the development of The Commons Conservancy.
- Activities supported under the Software Governance and Support of the GN project (developer training, software testing and code review, GÉANT Software catalogue.
- Development of OSS as part of the GNX projects and community developments within Task Forces and SIGs.
- Use and funding of OSS to support various NREN services (Shibboleth, SimpleSAMLPhP, eduVPN, Filesender etc.).
As Open Source Software (OSS) is becoming more and more important for the GN5 Project as well as NRENs, we would like to spend time to identify the gaps in the support of current OSS initiatives and collecting community feedback regarding main OSS problems that our community is facing on a daily basis.
Issued Raised
- IPR, licensing and commitments.
- Build vs buy and community focus.
- Support community members so they may be allowed to work on OSS projects as part of their daytime jobs. We have been doing this in the GEANT trust and identity incubator, but that is due to the nature of the incubator on an ad-hoc basis and mostly on 'new' features. A lot of work needed is however maintenance and bug fixing, which is just as critical
- support OSS communities who seek to have their software evaluated for security issues by external parties. This is typically very valuable input and helps to improve the quality and security of the products, but it is also expensive and time consuming.
- financially sponsor some OSS projects that are important to us, but where we may not have direct involvement.
- moving from project oriented to maintained product.
- Collective representation towards non-nren oss (e.g, openstack);
- Collective approaches to budget requirements for collectively required oss (anything that improves on organ grinder style passing of the hat),
- Organisation-independent career paths for engineers that work on "the collective".