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Defining Corporate Objectives

Placeholder for OSR GitHub issue https://github.com/finos/open-source-readiness/issues/55

This is based on the OSFF Roundtable discussion on OSPO ROI

How do OSPOs measure their effectiveness? This seems to be an open area for discussion in the finance industry at the moment. The list below summarizes some of the thinking around this.

Talent Acquisition​

  • Does having an open source presence materially affect hiring talent? Is there a reflected benefit in working on open source?

Code Consumption​

  • Can you measure the amount of open source code the organisation is consuming?
  • Is there a way of justifying the OSPO based on risk-reduction around consuming open source code?
  • Does consuming open source reduce the amount of proprietary code that an institution uses? In which case, is there a cost-saving on license fees for using open source?

De-Duplication​

  • Often, an open source library will contain bugs, discovered by developers internal to your organisation. The default (only) option available is to take ownership of a copy of the library and maintain bug fixes in your copy.
  • This quickly becomes onerous when there are multiple teams within the organisation doing this for the same libraries.
  • There is a strong case for allowing open source contribution in order to lighten the load of this maintenance and ownership.
  • It should be possible to look at where an institution has contributed fixes to Open Source projects - measuring this might be a way to justify allowing Open Source contribution, since each time this happens you are avoiding the above scenario happening.
  • This can also happen not just for bugs but for missing functionality.

External Contribution​

  • Where an institution open sources its own code, how much contribution occurs from outside the organisation?
  • For firms like Facebook, open-sourcing React has lead to the creation of an entire ecosystem based around this software. Facebook benefit from all this post-hoc innovation for free.
  • At the moment, financial institutions don't really have a "React level" project, but nevertheless it would be useful to track external contribution.
  • For a project like Perspective, originally donated by JP Morgan, contributions are now being made both from committers external to JP Morgan and also alumni.

Popularity​

  • Metrics like stars and forks on GitHub repos go some way towards measuring this.

Strategic Objectives​

  • Often a firm will have strategic objectives which dovetail into open source. For example, if your firm wishes to publish APIs then the OSPO should be recognised as a part of achieving these.

Rationalising / Consolidating​

  • Is the OSPO able to make recommendations around which open source libraries and projects to invest in? If so, can they create metrics around how much this simplifies the technology landscape?
Last updated on by Rob Moffat