Open Compliance Summit

Open source is fundamental to Microsoft's products and services with several million uses of open source components across thousands of teams at the company. At the same time, compliance, security, and supply chain demands are increasing. These challenges introduce friction and risk into the system. To address this, the team at Microsoft has developed a comprehensive set of policies, processes and tools that, combined with quality data, enable the automated handling of 99%+ of use cases. In this talk Jeff outlines the challenges, details the approaches taken and tools used, and describes how you can apply similar techniques in your enterprise.

There have been some legal cases of FOSS developers enforcing their copyrights against companies. However, establishing the developer’s copyright ownership of FOSS projects only by copyright notice is difficult. On one hand, copyright notice may not refer to the real contributor of the source code. On another hand, copyright ownership can be assessed by the proportion and importance of the developer’s contribution instead of the copyright notice.

This talk will have a look at the thousands of copyright notices in Linux kernel. When and by whom are they created? How are they modified? Could they tell the correct copyright ownership? Not only the present situation of copyright notices but also the dynamic changes during the software evolution will be investigated. This talk aims at drawing the complete life cycle of the copyright notices buried in the large-scale source code.