In recent years, domestic Internet giants have successively set up Open Source Program Office (OSPO), and some of them are more effective in OSPO construction. Although OSPO is not a new thing, few people unveil its mystery, so it is often misunderstood by the outside world, and some people even say that it is just a waste of resources. Therefore, Open Source China invited four industry experts to talk about the real OSPO.
host
Wang Yejing (first brother): VP Apache APISIX Committer
observer
Tison: Author of the public account of "The Book of Night and Sky", Apache Member&Incubator Tutor
Share guests
Keith Chan: CNCF China Director, LF Asia Pacific Strategy Director
Dui Junping: General Manager of Huawei OSDT and Chairman of LF AI&DATA Foundation
Bian Sikang: senior expert of Ant Group's Technology Strategy Development Department, executive director of the Open Source Office
Topic 1: What is OSPO?
Wang Yejing (first brother): What is OSPO ？ What are its forms? First, let's invite observer Tison to talk.
tison： OSPO， The full name is Open Source Program Office. When translated into Chinese, the program is removed, so it is called Open Source Office. From some enterprise use cases, it is quite appropriate. For“ OSPO What is it.
Nowadays, almost all business activities are based on software, and software always depends on some open source Components. Therefore, Enterprises will more or less participate in open source. To sum up, it is nothing more than using open source, participating in open source, and launching open source projects.
stay this In the process, enterprise There will certainly be many problems, so we need to“ OSPO ”Such departments to solve these problems.
OSPO Functions involve many aspects. his The most basic function Legal and security, For example Dealing with open source compliance, software defect repair, security vulnerabilities and other issues ； It also involves research and development. After all, the core of open source is software ； In addition, And Market, operation and other departments also There is a certain relationship, because open source can be used as a means of free value-added (such as MongoDB), and it also has its own brand effect and communication advantages.
about OSPO The architecture of the enterprise is summarized as follows:
In our country, OSPO The most common form is virtual organization. It is very different from the physical department. There is no reporting line to report to the CEO. current domestic Most enterprises Attitude towards OSPO They are all in the trial stage, so they tend to set up a virtual department, such as PingCAP. PingCAP's OSPO In terms of legal affairs, compliance and security, there will be full-time employees, or at least part of the work related to them, and R&D and marketing specialists will also participate.
OSPO As part of the overall market strategy ， Common in open source technology start-ups. For them, open source software or open source ecology is one of the core competitiveness of the company, so they often use some successful cases for reference, regard open source as one of the marketing methods, link OSPO with the marketing department, or incorporate OSPO into the marketing department, as part of the overall market strategy. Some start-ups pay more attention to R&D and will set up a separate technical architecture committee, which is similar to OSPO There are some differences. The Technical Architecture Committee is a purely technical department, which focuses on the technical field in most cases OSPO It is a multi-dimensional department involving legal affairs, security, research and development, market, operation, etc. Open source community is mainly divided into user community and developer community ， This kind OSPO More attention is paid to the user community.
OSPO As a separate entity department, it can directly report to the CEO ； Or it is attached to the R&D department and reported to the CTO or technical VP. as for OSPO What to deal with depends on the department Recruit What kind of people. If the recruitment is from R&D background, then focus on technology development, if yes Talents in legal affairs or security will naturally prefer the direction they are good at.
These three categories OSPO's generality lie in, All belong to horizontal empowerment departments, even if It's a virtual department No exception , although it has business cooperation relationship with other departments, it will not or rarely undertake business directly.
There are also a few OSPO It is a purely horizontal department, which provides a complete open source consulting capability, but rarely participates in the operation or implementation of specific businesses. At most, it will arrange a liaison person to participate in other departments as a consultant.
To sum up, from a pragmatic perspective, OSPO What we need to solve is the problems encountered in using open source, participating in open source, and launching open source projects. From the perspective of leisure, OSPO is a kind of culture 。 For example, the open culture of Red Hat, to some extent, can also be considered as OSPO Of course, this is also part of the corporate culture.
Keith Chan： I use comparison ordinary Let's explain it with a metaphor. I think OSPO A diplomat, as well as He is an external diplomat as well as an internal diplomat.
Every company OSPO for Have their own positioning and functions also All are different, but in general, the ability to communicate must be established. Even if it is a simple thing, such as open source compliance And Communication with R&D department.
Why did you do it? Is there a problem with the license? Is there any problem with copyright? These issues need to be clarified, especially when it comes to exports. Not everyone all Knowing this, communication ability is very important, which is also what I call OSPO For diplomats.
Many company leaders do not know the importance of open source, although the software they use is more or less related to open source ， They all turn a blind eye. As for why to manage open source, how much open source is used, and how important these open source projects are, we don't know. Some people will leave these problems to R&D 。 I see many companies face such problems ， Neither managed open source strategically well, nor had enough energy to put it into action.
in fact ， Both internally and externally OSPO Let's make these things clear.
Topic 2: What problems should OSPO solve?
Wang Yejing: From the perspective of enterprises, OSPO What kind of problems do you mainly want to solve ， How did you land it?
Dujunping: Why is there such an organization as OSPO? The premise of this question must be Is on There are some obstacles in the use or contribution of open source.
Open source has swept the IT history for more than 30 years, giving birth to Linux M ySQL、 K eight S And a batch of familiar open source software. In the early days, the number of open source software was small, and there might not be too many problems. But now, many enterprises Of The IT infrastructure base is basically open source. According to the previous report issued by the Linux Foundation, more than 80% of the world's software is developed based on open source software.
Not only IT enterprises, but also traditional enterprises cannot be separated from open source. Huawei has also experienced Has There are several processes. About 20 years ago, when Huawei was still selling hardware boxes, it began to gradually use Open source software, such as Linux, faces the problem of how to use and manage open source software. For a long time, OSPO was not a formed department, but there was a allied Functional departments are responsible for the management of open source, including introduction and selection. We know that as the supply of open source software becomes more and more abundant and the community becomes more and more diverse, it is increasingly important to choose an open source software that can develop or is suitable for carrying business missions. The unreasonable selection of open source software is equivalent to one pen Huge technical debt.
Therefore, in the early days, Huawei's OSPO mainly solved the following problems: how to select open source software, how to support business development, and how to use it in compliance.
Almost ten years ago, Huawei's business shifted from traditional industry to IT industry ， Computing business and cloud business involve a lot of open source Software 。 Here one At this stage, in addition to using open source, Huawei also contributes to open source, and even has some advantageous projects to open source to build an industrial ecosystem, expand its partner circle, and benefit from the whole sharing ecosystem. This is another function of OSPO, namely, building the so-called open source strategy.
Open source strategy must focus on business. There are many forms of business. Is it hardware oriented, software oriented, cloud oriented, or consumer oriented? The open source strategy is different for different business forms, but the basic principle and purpose are the same. It is to serve our business strategy well and build an overall industrial ecology. The role of OSPO is to identify important and key open source fields and make continuous efforts in them, including building open source culture, improving technical influence and making the whole ecosystem bigger and stronger.
Topic 3: What are the challenges OSPO faces?
Wang Yejing (first brother): Where is the complexity of open source management? Is it complex enough to build a special organization to solve this problem?
Dujunping: As introduced by tison, OSPO There are different forms of organization, some are virtual organizations, and some are physical organizations, both of which I have experienced. Huawei's OSPO It is an entity organization with a full-time team working on open source. But where I used to be Of Company, Its OSPO It is a virtual organization. Each business team will assign some people to join this virtual organization to solve problems related to open source.
Virtual organizations and physical organizations face different challenges because they carry different business missions.
One view is that OSPO is a competency center. What is a competence center? The OSPO team is composed of experts to help each business department when it has legal, technical, operational or marketing needs.
The problem with this model is that when other departments have demands, they cannot respond quickly, unable Support high-frequency calling 。 This is especially true for OSPO in the form of virtual organization. In fact, many business decisions are timely, and the best window period will be missed. Of course, in general, the capability center is sufficient to support the business, and there is no problem. For example, how to make good use of open source, how to correctly avoid pitfalls, how to formulate open source version planning, etc., these issues are not so timely.
Another view is that, OSPO As a business center, it should carry some business missions and cooperate with the company's business as part of the entire ecological team. In this case, if it is a virtual organization, it may not be suitable. Because virtual The organization is unable to respond in a timely and effective manner, probably It will cause more problems.
Now is not the time when open source was scarce 20 or 30 years ago. It is not an open source project, and others will use it immediately. In addition to open source projects, we also need to operate and promote them. There are many things to consider, such as who you need to establish cooperation with to promote open source projects; When doing publicity and promotion, we should continue to make breakthroughs at fixed points. How to be a good diplomat is a difficult point for the business center to solve.
The open source community is composed of people from different backgrounds. Users, contributors, and even onlookers all have their own ideas. When promoting open source projects, disputes arise. How can we resolve them? So, how Communicate effectively, turn hostility into friendship, continue to effectively promote products, and establish connections with everyone ； how Bring the voice of the community back to the interior to promote the engineering team to improve the technical products ， These are the problems that the OSPO team needs to solve.
Bian Sikang: One thing that cannot be ignored is that OSPO should solve both internal and external problems. Members of OSPO should play the roles of COO, CMO, and even CTO and CEO at the same time. Of course, these things may not be done by one person, but OSPO All members of. In this case, the complexity of general business has doubled.
When doing technology, we will consider very specifically who the business users are, what kind of effect they want, what kind of technical solutions they can provide, and what kind of design they can make This link is very clear. However, in the open source environment, it is no longer "one-to-one" or "one-to-one" mode, but more like "N-to-N" communication.
On the other hand, do open source affirmation Meeting with Specification and safety Make connections , because open source itself is a corresponding Of Risk points. At the same time, open source will have a lot of external exchanges, and will communicate with the market department Make connections 。 These relationships are complex, leading to many problems that OSPO has to solve. Even if we abstract all the problems at the second level, it is still a very complicated thing, because we cannot solve all the problems of everyone.
However, in the process, OSPO If go It is also inappropriate to teach others to do things. Open source is originally an adaptive and community-based growth environment. We often use the rainforest as a metaphor for open source, because there is no fixed form of open source. We will also Where? Learn many advanced practices, but directly use them use It's unrealistic.
Finally, I think the core of open source is still the saying - "It is better to teach people how to fish than to teach them how to fish". In fact, we can spend more time to cultivate this mind come 。 But the core difficulty here is how can we systematically explain open source? Because open source is not a very specific thing.
Topic 4: What is OSPO's operational dilemma?
Wang Yejing (first brother): Tison, as an outsider, what you see OSPO What are some objective problems we are facing now?
tison： Companies like Huawei and Ant pay more attention to strategic matters. his OSPO In terms of open source governance and use, more work is confined to the company itself or is relatively closed. From the perspective of research and development, the development of open source software is not developed by an enterprise alone. It is not an enterprise developer who develops a software and calls it "Open Source", which is quite different from true open source.
In reality, enterprises Will put Some open source software is donated to the Open Source Foundation, which has some basic rules to help open source projects, such as how to make decisions. For traditional developers, Follow these rules It is a challenge. however, Like Apache Software A community such as the foundation has obvious traces of enterprise participation, so enterprise developers will naturally understand how to collaborate after growing up from the community.
If you lack such ability, do not know how to cooperate with the outside world, and do not know how to release software based on industry strength, you will still stay in a closed software development mode. The development efficiency of open source collaboration is much higher than that of closed development. Linux has millions of contributors, which is unmatched by enterprises.
Operation is also a typical problem. Many enterprises, especially technology-based start-ups stay In this regard Behave Most obvious. The project of a large enterprise can also be considered as a small, virtual technology start-up company, which will encounter these ones here Challenges.
occasionally Operation output content （ For example, an article ） , but He didn't know What are the specific requirements? anyway So the article went out. Most operations in China The experience of C end, and I don't know what the development community should look like. stay For many enterprises, the communication between R&D and operation is broken, and the operation will never tell R&D that where your articles are not well written, at most they will feed back that your reading is not good.
More often, enterprises should rely on the open source community to obtain resources, instead of Enterprises pay a lot of employees to answer community questions all day, which is a loss. Let users answer each other's questions spontaneously to make the community more robust.
Some big factories do not rely on open source software to make money. Their goals yes Attract open-source talents. Good operation, good brand build And industry influence Promotion of It's very helpful. If you build in the open source community Got up Reputation will attract many talents 。 For example, Google Just Because many influential papers have been published, Attracted a lot engineer.
In these aspects, the enterprise's OSPO It has obvious value. Moreover, the deeper and long-term value, the greater the role of OSPO.
Topic 5: Under what circumstances should OSPO be established?
Wang Yejing (first brother): Most business driven companies don't know enough about Open Source ， Think that open source is free. I've gone through detours before, I once In the company, the open source committee is widely promoted, advocating to contribute middleware to the foundation, but in fact, it is difficult to implement it. Then, under what circumstances do enterprises need to establish or think about establishing OSPO?
Keith Chan： Regardless of the size of the company, as long as open source is used, it will be found that open source can save a lot of costs. However, if the enterprise only uses open source without giving back to the community, still Many people are required to maintain the code. A large company did not participate in the upstream of OBS, Invested More than 100 people went to maintain the project.
Not only IT industry, financial industry or traditional industry are using open source, and 80%~90% of the code used by enterprises now is open source ， but Few people think about how to manage these codes, which gradually become "code liabilities".
and, At present, many talents and technology gods are mined from open source. If the enterprise has no popularity in open source, it is difficult to attract these talents. Therefore, without open source, the competitiveness of enterprises will be lower and lower, and the cost will be higher and higher.
Dujunping: I agree with Keith very much. It is not only companies that want to make money through open source that need to establish OSPO. As long as you want to make good use of open source, you can try to establish OSPO, whether it is to save costs, improve efficiency, or strengthen organizational culture. Among them, the most important point is whether you encounter pain points, no matter yes Encountered when using open source or promoting open source business.
Some time ago, many open source vulnerabilities were exposed, and many related businesses and software all Has been affected. Open Source Software There are tens of millions of code warehouses on it. How to choose a project? How to maintain after selection? All companies face such problems.
In addition, when you Bifurcate An open source project Transition , some bugs need to be fixed more or less in the running process. If you don't get the repair directly from upstream code , but rely on their own team to sew and repair, and finally the operation and maintenance team Only It's getting bigger and bigger.
Especially our Internet companies, growing up from small companies, look back and find investment Of There are more developers than the existing PMC in the community. Why does this happen? In my opinion, first of all, there is no long-term open source planning and no clear concept; secondly, No, Upstream First 。 People with long experience of open source Will Found that, Upstream priority It is a very economical way to manage open source, and it also fits in with the open source culture. Open source means giving back to the community.
Without an experienced open source team, the enterprise is likely to Level There are losses. Therefore, when the team encounters difficulties, it is advisable to introduce external resources and talents to form OSPO.
Bian Sikang: If OSPO is defined as a diplomat, when does it need to be established? It is the time to establish diplomatic relations with foreign countries. Who needs to establish diplomatic relations with foreign countries? Any enterprise may need it.
Don't open source for the sake of open source, or everyone will be uncomfortable. But then again, if open source can really help you, it is important for communication to establish such a diplomatic role yes Great help Of 。
I think the establishment of OSPO is similar to other decision-making links. When there are only ten people in the company at the beginning, you don't need the efficiency department, because everyone is responsible for the efficiency. When the company has 30 employees, you do not need the Technology Risk Department, because all core technology risks are reflected in business code.
however When the potential benefits of solving open source problems have scale effects, when open source projects begin to appear in multiple BUs of the company （ Business Unit， Business Unit ） OSPO will certainly help you when the open source "chimney" appears.
In fact, the architecture department of many companies initially solved Upstream problem. When the structure of different teams in the company is repeated appear Will form "chimneys" 。 Many things can be reused. Why do we need to make wheels repeatedly? Can I do endogenous? A bunch of derivative problems came out.
We don't have to establish an OSPO, but the enterprise must have a similar person in charge who can provide help in the aspect of open source, explain the open source clearly and put it into practice.
In addition, I think whether you are open source or not, whether your business is t O B or t o C， In fact, we can understand the spirit of open source ， What is the history of open source development. Help brought by the spirit of open source ， no only It is limited to OSPO. So I think Should have been earlier Use the spirit of open source.
Wang Yejing (first brother): Many companies will build project efficiency and PMO to a certain extent. Let me ask, why build? Why build it at this time instead of half a year ago? It is because there are too many and too slow projects that enterprises want to do. Open source is the same. When your open source usage rate is large enough and the number of open source infrastructure is large enough to a certain extent, it is necessary to manage it. Open source is like air. If the air has been polluted, people will begin to cough. Can we not treat it?
This article comes from the second issue of the best collection of open source, Open Source Watch. For more exciting content, please click to download:
https://oscimg.oschina.net/public_shard/opensource-guanzhi-20220707.pdf
