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Open-source governance: rules, licences, ownership.

Last updated: · ALVPHA Tech GmbH

The building blocks

  • Policy: which licences and sources are allowed and who approves
  • Inventory: which components are in which products and releases, ideally as an SBOM
  • Licence obligations: fulfil notices, licence texts and source code offers depending on the licence
  • Security: monitor, assess and handle vulnerabilities
  • Ownership: named owners for components and escalations
  • Evidence: document review status and decisions for customers and auditors

Licences: permissive and copyleft

Permissive licences such as MIT, BSD or Apache-2.0 mainly require attribution and passing on the licence text. Copyleft licences such as the GPL require derivative works to be distributed under the same terms; weaker variants such as LGPL or MPL limit this depending on how code is combined. Standard SPDX licence identifiers make this information machine-readable and verifiable.

OSPO and OpenChain

Larger organisations bundle these tasks in an Open Source Program Office (OSPO). The OpenChain standards have become the established process standards: ISO/IEC 5230 for licence compliance programmes and ISO/IEC 18974 for security assurance programmes for open source. Both describe which processes should be in place, not which tools to use.

Link to the Cyber Resilience Act

The Cyber Resilience Act requires manufacturers to exercise due diligence when integrating third-party components, explicitly including free and open-source software (Article 13(5) of Regulation (EU) 2024/2847). Working open-source governance is the practical way to demonstrate that diligence.

Frequently asked questions

Do we need our own OSPO?

Not necessarily. What matters are clear rules, named owners and a maintained inventory; an OSPO is one organisational form for this.

What does an OpenChain self-certification mean?

An organisation declares that its programme meets the requirements of ISO/IEC 5230 or ISO/IEC 18974. It is not a third-party certification by an audit body.

SOURCES

This article provides technical orientation and is not legal advice. The linked primary sources in their current version are authoritative.

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