Your OSPO’s Role in Ensuring Long-Term Business Viability - Masae Shida, VMware
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 07/12/2023

Your OSPO’s Role in Ensuring Long-Term Business Viability - Masae Shida, VMware

Companies use open source to drive engineering efficiencies and resolve customers’ challenges. But how do we know that the open source within our product will ‘continue’ to be available? If we rely on specific projects, it’s necessary to regularly assess their viability and our company’s involvement level within the communities. Healthy, viable projects attract people. They lead to broader adoption in the ecosystem, healthy communities and expand the market to increase our business opportunity. Your product teams may check the project health stats but if your organization isn’t involved enough in the governance of the projects, you may have insufficient influence in the project roadmap. VMware’s OSPO runs a strategic project assessment that focuses on the impact to our business and the entire ecosystem from multiple perspectives – both internal and external to the community. We set clear criteria and share the result with the teams, discuss challenges and next steps for improvements. This approach increases business sustainability and reduces the risk of impacts to our business such as shortage of maintainers, undesired license changes and unexpected shifts in direction. This talk will focus on why and how you can help increase the long-term viability of the projects your business depends upon today and the platforms you will build upon tomorrow.