David Nutter

Yanking the Chain: Open Source Software Compliance in the Supply Chain – London 22/3/2018

 in OSSG Events  tagged EclipseSW360 / FOSSology / OpenChain / QMSTR / Quartermaster / SPDX by (updated 2255 days ago)

09:00-17:00, Thursday 22nd March 2018 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA, UK.

The event is free to attend, however registration is required:

https://ossg220318.eventbrite.co.uk/

Bookings close on Wednesday 21st March 2018 at 8:30AM and none will be taken after this date.

Introduction

With the ever increasing complexity of embedded device software stacks, coupled with the proliferation of new mechanisms for distributing complex server software stacks, open source compliance has never been more important — or indeed more of a challenge.

Fortunately, there are growing number of tools and methods at our disposal to support open source software compliance efforts. This 1-day event will feature talks and hands-on workshops covering a number of these, with insights into practical experiences and lessons learned.

Hosted by the BCS Open Source Specialist Group in partnership with the Open Source Hardware user Group.

Talks

Introducing OpenChain

OpenChain is a scalable, flexible compliance programme, developed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a great foundation for businesses of all sizes to adopt appropriate practices and procedures in place to control development and supply chain risks. Already adopted by companies like Qualcomm, Toyota and ARM, it’s equally applicable to SMEs.

About the Speaker

Andrew Katz is a lawyer and former programmer who advises extensively on free and open source software and other opens. He is head of the technology department at Moorcrofts LLP, a boutique technology law firm, which is one of the 5 OpenChain pilot partners in the world, and has been involved in drafting many of the OpenChain materials.

SPDX: Describing Software and Licenses

Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) provides a standard format for describing the components and licenses associated with software packages. The SPDX standard helps facilitate compliance with Free and Open Source Software licenses by standardizing the way license information is shared across the software supply chain. SPDX reduces redundant work by providing a common format for companies and communities to share licensing data, thereby streamlining and improving compliance. The presentation will introduce the standard, describe common use scenarios, and provide details on the other deliverables of the SPDX working group, like tools and the authoritative License List.

About the Speaker

Alexios Zavras, PhD, is the Senior Open Source Compliance Engineer of Intel Corporation. He has been involved with Free and Open Source Software since 1983, and is an evangelist for all things Open. He has a PhD in Computer Science after having studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Greece and the United States.

Eclipse SW360 – Open Source Management with Open Source

SW360 manages software components with their license compliance documentation in SPDX and allows for setting up bills-of-material to provide comprehensive documentation for products and projects.

Organizations can use SW360 as a one-stop shop for sharing component information, tracking their usage in projects or products. This involves the handing of compliance information, but also, as an example, matching for vulnerabilities from data providers.

As an EPL-1.0 licensed Open Source project (see https://www.github.com/sw360), it is highly customizable, letting organizations keep their confidential product development data on premises, and prevents them from becoming dependent on a single vendor. This presentation shows briefly features and a walk through the application to demonstrate capabilities and use cases of SW360.

About the Speaker

Michael C. Jaeger is one of the maintainers for the projects, FOSSology and SW360, both of which are in the area of license compliance and component management with open source software. At Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich, Germany, Michael manages the Siemens contributions to SW360 and FOSSology. Michael is a certified software architect and received a German PhD degree from the faculty of electrical engineering and computer science at TU Berlin.

How License Compliance Engineering Can be Simplified

When people are confronted with license compliance for the first time it feels overwhelming because there are many aspects to it: license scanning of hundreds of thousands of files, complete and corresponding source code, derivative works and code clone detection, and so on. Clients often say that they simply do not know where to start.

However, experience demonstrates that license compliance does not need to be overly complicated, as there are short-cuts that can be taken and have zero risk, but that will vastly speed up compliance processes. This talk will highlight a few best practices learned from compliance work with clients and explain how information from upstream projects can be used to make the license compliance processes quicker, predictable and more standardised.

About the Speaker

Armijn Hemel, MSc, is an expert in open source license compliance engineering. From 2005-2012 he helped enforce the GPL license in Germany several hundred times as part of the coreteam of gpl-violations.org. Since then he has assisted companies to come into compliance (including in recent troll cases in Germany) and is actively involved in advancing the field of compliance by exploring new topics and tooling.

Compliance Tooling using Build Time Analysis

The Quartermaster project aims at building industry standard tooling that supports the open source license compliance workflow. It’s open source workflow engine integrates existing scanning and reporting tools, and integrates into continuous integration/development processes. It offers API endpoints against which toolmakers, communities and service providers can integrate their products, while maintaining an open source and open data model for the elemental toolchain.

The presentation will explore a number of key findings from the development of Quartermaster so far. For example, that focusing on whole source packages alone to identify and convey license information may be insufficient, and that the product build process may be the most suitable time to create compliance documentation. The presentation will introduce the Quartermaster project, the novel approach it takes on implementing open source compliance tooling, and how the lessons learned from the prototype influenced the Quartermaster toolchain architecture.

About the Speaker

Mirko Boehm is a Free Software and Open Source contributor, primarily as a software developer and speaker. He is the founder of the Quartermaster project, and has been a contributor to major Open Source projects including the KDE Desktop since 1997, including several years on the KDE e.V. Board. He is a visiting lecturer and researcher on Free Software and Open Source at the Technical University of Berlin, a fellowship representative in the FSFE general assembly and a Qt-certified specialist and trainer.

The Open Invention Network protects the Open Source ecosystem by acquiring patents and licensing them royalty free to all participants. As director for the Linux system definition, Mirko is responsible for the technical scope that defines the field of use of the patent non-aggression agreements.

As founder and CEO of Endocode, an employee-owned, shareholder company based in Berlin, Germany providing professional IT services with a focus on Open Source technologies, Mirko specialises in consulting to and mentoring startups and medium to large businesses. His areas of expertise include complex software development endeavours, the use of Open Source products and methods in organisations, and technology related issues of business strategy and intellectual property.

Workshops

Using FOSSology – License Analysis Hands On

FOSSology is an open source license compliance software system and toolkit. As a toolkit, you can run license, copyright and export control scans from the command line. As a system, a database and Web user interface provide you with user interface and functionality to analyse the licensing situation of open source software.

Hosted By Michael C. Jaeger.

About the organiser:

This event is organised by the BCS Open Source Specialist Group in partnership with the Open Source Hardware User Group. Find out more about the group at https://ossg.bcs.org/.

For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event please note that BCS does not issue invitation letters.

Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick Workshop – London 22/2/2018

 in Uncategorized by

On the 22 February 2018, 09:00 – 17:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA,  [map] (51.510812, -0.121733)

Please register to attend and share on Lanyrd.

Learn how to use the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick and open source frameworks to deploy deep neural networks at the edge.

Workshop details

Market research estimates there will be as many as 20 billion connected devices in the market by 2020. These devices are expected to generate billions of petabytes of data traffic between cloud and edge devices. In 2017 alone, 8.4B connected devices are expected in the market which is sparking a strong need to pre-process data at the edge. This has led many IoT device manufacturers, especially those working on vision based devices like smart cameras, drones, robots, AR/VR, etc., to bring intelligence to the edge.

Through the recent addition of the Movidius™ VPU technology to its existing AI edge solutions portfolio, Intel is well positioned to provide solutions that help developers and data scientists pioneer the low-power intelligent edge devices segment. This workshop will provide hands-on experience with Intel’s Neural Compute Stick – a low-cost, form-factor developer kit for low-power vision based embedded inference applications.

What You Will Learn:

  • Insights into how Movidius™ VPUs are pioneering DNN accelerated vision processing.
  • Introduction to hardware and software components of NCS.
  • Workflow of network profiling and application development using NCS.
  • Detection/Classification models
  • Advanced functionalities
  • Hands-on with advanced demos and sample codes built using NC SDK’s API framework, which includes support for Caffe and TensorFlow

Participant requirements

** Participants are required to bring a laptop computer with Ubuntu 16.04 and Neural Compute SDK installed **

What is provided

  • NCS hardware will be provided for use during the workshop
  • A light lunch will be provided and please ensure that any dietary requirements are made clear during registration

Hosted by

The workshop will be hosted by Intel engineers.

This workshop is free to attend and hosted by Intel in partnership with the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and the Open Source Hardware User Group.

Note: Please aim to arrive by 08:45 as the workshop will start at 09:00 prompt.

Sponsored by:

DesignSpark

Collaborative music making, ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing – London 18/1/2018

 in Uncategorized by

On the 18 January 2018, 18:00 – 21:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA,  [map] (51.510812, -0.121733)

Please register to attend and share on Lanyrd.

We start the new year with an event on the theme of open source musical software and hardware.

Bela, an embedded platform for ultra-low latency audio and sensor processing

Bela started off as a research project at Centre For Digital Music (Queen Mary University of London) and is now a commercial product, mainly aimed at makers, programmers and researchers that work with audio. The platform is based on a BeagleBone Black with a custom expansion cape and a dedicated software environment. The board runs Debian Linux with Xenomai as a real-time co-kernel. The combined use of Xenomai and the BeagleBone Black’s on-board PRU microcontroller allows to achieve sub-millisecond latency for audio and sensor processing, while node.js is used to provide a user-friendly web-based IDE. The project is entirely open source, hardware and software.

Giulio Moro is a PhD student in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. A sound engineer by training, he is now researching in the field of performer-instrument interaction. He is one of the inventors and core developers of Bela.

Female Laptop Orchestra: exploring geographical, cultural, technical and artistic challenges of collaborative music making

As a collective of female musicians, artists, engineers, computer scientists and researchers, Female Laptop Orchestra has been pushing the boundaries of technology and cross-cultural co-located and distributed collaborative music making since 2014. Besides musical instruments, we use a variety of open source and commercial tools to create music, stream music and connect with our audience during the performance. We often collaborate with classical composers and ensembles, filmmakers, visual designers, choreographers and dancers. Recently, we also collaborated with members of Women in Music Technology (a student organization whose goal is to encouraging more women to join the music tech field of study and highlight the often unsung role of women in music technology, based at Georgia Tech Centre for Music Technology in US) and Sonora (a collaborative network bringing together artists and researchers interested in feminist manifestations in the context of the arts, based in Brazil).

Nela Brown is a sound artist, technologist, researcher and educator. In the past decade, she composed music and designed sound for award-winning projects including theatre performances, dance, mobile, film, documentaries and interactive installations. She is the founder of the Female Laptop Orchestra (FLO), an eclectic group of female musicians and technologists exploring co-located and distributed collaborative music making within different contexts and across different geographical locations. As a creative director of FLO since 2014, Nela co-ordinated 7 national and international FLO performances involving 36 collaborators from 21 different countries.

Talk #3 TBA

Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

Closing date for bookings is Tuesday 16th January 2018 at 11:30 pm. No more bookings will be taken after this date. For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event please note that BCS does not issue invitation letters

Paul Richardson: Open Source Health Informatics 1

 in OSSG Article / Uncategorized  tagged article / healthcare by (updated 1737 days ago)

Paul Richardson writes:

Some of you may already know about my views on the revolutionary effect that could be triggered by the NHS adopting the use of open source software (and an open source approach to developing its own software). I have not been able to contain myself any longer and so my thoughts are now finding wider expression in a blog that I’ve started:


http://www.oshi-uk.com/

Earlier today I posted an article on a proposed top 10 open source projects for the NHS. I would be very interested to receive your comments. The idea is to use the blog as a focal point for an emerging community of interested parties until the point in time that a more appropriate rallying point is established.

If you are interested in this subject, you can subscribe to the blog using RSS or follow me on Twitter which I will use to announce new posts.

External event: Leveraging Open Source Software for Commercial Advantage

 in External Events / OSSG Events by

Andrew Katz has asked us to pass on details of the above event. Apologies for the short notice!

Andrew Katz, partner at Moorcrofts, and a former programmer himself, will be giving a brief presentation on the practical steps that companies can take to avoid the “viral” issues that many people perceive to be an issue with open source software, and will demonstrate that by taking some simple steps, companies can take advantage of the vast pool of high quality software code and use it to their own commercial advantage, after which he and the rest of the Moorcrofts team will be available to discuss the issues, and there will also be an opportunity to network over a pint and some nibbles.

When
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 6:00 PM (GMT+0100)
Where
George and Dragon The Causeway (Lower High Street)
SL7 2AA Marlow
United Kingdom

Further details at http://moorcrofts.eventbrite.com/

Alfresco Meetup: London

 in External Events / OSSG Article / OSSG Events  tagged article by (updated 1737 days ago)

We’ve recently received word that the creators of the Alfresco Open Source content management system are holding a “Meetup” event at the Park Plaza, Victoria, London. The organisers provided the following description:

The Meetups cover a range of open source topics, and are designed to inform and educate the community on all the latest company news. Some Alfresco Customer speakers from last year included the CIO’s from Islington and the North London Waste Authority, and Alfresco is planning more customer speakers for the events this year.

For further details please see http://www.alfresco.com/about/events/2010/04/ukmeetup/

Recent downtime

 in OSSG News by (updated 5343 days ago)

The server on which this site resided hitherto recently suffered hardware failure and the site was therefore restored from backup on a new server at a different location. Between the time required for the restoration process itself and the DNS updates necessary to make the restored site visible we suffered several days downtime. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Looking on the bright side, we took the opportunity to update the WordPress software which runs the site and the new server is considerably better specified than the old machine so the site should be more responsive.

Unfortunately, the restoration process required a reset of all MailMan passswords, so if you wish to unsubscribe or change your preferences you will need to request a password reminder from MailMan.