SAP publishes open source manifesto

Manifesto is “more than a declaration of our current contributions; it’s a promise to continue driving open innovation and collaboration at a significant scale,” says SAP CTO. It arrives alongside the announcement of SAP’s Open Reference Architecture project as part of the EU’s IPCEI-CIS initiative.

It’s an open secret that even proprietary software contains open source components these days, and major vendors are, to varying extents, supporting or participating in open source projects. However, all such contributions are not created equal.

Software giant SAP, a longtime contributor to open source and one of the top ten contributors to projects has published what it calls its Open Source Manifesto, in which it states its principles about how it engages with open source and pledges to continue its contributions and engagement with the community. SAP said in a post that the manifesto “talks about SAP’s commitments to open source, about our vision, about our external engagement with open source, and how we empower our employees to collaborate with open source. It is a clear statement providing guidance to our internal developers, but also customers, partners, and developer ecosystem.”

It contains five commitments — make consistent contributions to the community, champion open standards, strive to adopt an open-first approach, nurture open source ecosystems, and adopt a feedback-driven approach.

SAP’s manifesto is in reaction to the fact that all is not always sunshine and roses in the open source world.

“The open source world has seen a share of troubles in the recent past,” said Andrew Cornwall, senior analyst at Forrester Research. “Some corporate projects have migrated from open source licenses to other forms of license for business reasons. Others abide by the terms of the license but imply that those exercising rights under the license will lose future access. Finally, we’ve seen a sole overworked maintainer give co-maintainer status to a party who injected malicious backdoor code into a hobby project that’s also part of the Linux kernel.”

“SAP’s open source manifesto addresses these issues. SAP commits to open source, transparency, and respect for open source communities. It encourages its employees to participate in open source projects. It commits to supporting the open source projects it uses,” Cornwall added.

One project in particular drew a number of players to open source, noted Nitin Varshney, technical counselor at Info-Tech Research Group. After Oracle decided to move to a subscription model for Java, a decision it has, in part, since rolled back, open source alternatives blossomed.

“Organizations are seriously considering the alternatives of Oracle Java to open-source versions vastly because of the cost factor,” he said. “Organizations are choosing these platforms based on effective cost, performance, and scalability.” However, he added, although Oracle now provides both commercial and open source Java development kits under various licensing models, users of older versions of Java are tied to the commercial licensing and support.

“It is a reminder for organizations that have yet to plan for modernization in their IT landscape and upgrade their software to the latest versions,” he said.

Open Reference Architecture project

One key project for SAP is the Open Reference Architecture project under the European Union’s IPCEI-CIS (IPCEI Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services) initiative, in which it will develop and contribute a reference blueprint for “an open, flexible, powerful, and secure next-generation cloud-edge infrastructure.”

IPCEI-CIS’s goal is, said the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in a post, “the key digital policy project aimed at strengthening Europe’s digital and technological sovereignty.” More than 100 participants in 12 member states are working on components of the project, with a total investment of around three billion euros (about $3.2 billion), with the goal of building a “cloud-edge continuum” with a provider-agnostic common technological foundation for energy-saving, climate-neutral, highly efficient, automated, and interconnected services.