Collaboration Summit 2014

The Open Source Research Lab at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO), designs, develops, and supports four open source projects dedicated to the advancement of the SPDX standard. (1) The SPDX Dashboard for providing a dashboard interface to SPDX documents stored in a central repository. (2) The FOSSology+SPDX project for explicating FOSSology derived license information through the creation of ‘high definition’ SPDX documents. (3) The Yocto/SPDX project for providing automated SPDX generation for Yocto builds, producing ‘low definition’ SPDX documents. (4) The SPDX/Product project for tying SPDX documents to specific corporate products. At the 2014 Collaboration Summit, we will present our work in the advancement of the SPDX standard. The presentation will include an overview of the SPDX tools under development at UNO as well as demonstrations of each tool and their future directions.

Audience members will include developers, managers, and legal personnel interested in understanding, engaging, and advancing open compliance and the SPDX standard. Audience members will likely include participants from the SPDX Workgroup as well as members from potential partner projects including The Yocto Project and OpenDaylight. Audience members will be encouraged to participate, with time dedicated for discussion on how to advance open compliance generally and open source SPDX tooling more specifically.

Our presentation will focus on UNO’s collection of open source tooling dedicated to the advancement of the Linux Foundation-sponsored SPDX standard. We demonstrate SPDX at the center of emerging practices of open compliance, helping participants understand ways to participate meaningfully in open compliance activities. Our open source tooling is a way to see ‘SPDX in action’ through production and consumption activities. As open source transforms into a managed, stabilized, and professional engagement, structured practices are needed in the design and development of open source artifacts. SPDX represents an important component in how open source engagements make this transition, and our presentation is aimed at contributing to this conversation in an applied way.