“Muscular” OSPO: Taking open-source teams to the next level

You’ve likely heard of an OSPO (open-source program office) – a small, tactical team within a much larger tech organization. While the vast majority of that company’s engineers (sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands) work toward company goals, the OSPO works on the sidelines to block-and-tackle all the fine print that comes with making open-source contributions.

This can include things like legal issues, security concerns, and even cheerleading for a culture change toward open-source software. The OSPO team members are like pioneers whose main purpose is to open the doors for open-source at a company so that all the other engineers can contribute.

mOSPO: Bringing the muscle

We’ve seen first-hand the value of adding an OSPO to an organization. If you have 50,000 engineers, for example, and you can carve out maybe 5% or 10% of their time toward moving open-source forward, it translates to a huge benefit for the company and the open-source ecosystem at a relatively small cost.

We understand, however, that this isn’t always possible. Some companies’ engineers are working under strict confidentiality agreements, security protocols or other barriers that make open-source seemingly impossible.

But what if an outside team could handle not only the business of OSPO – the administration and housekeeping – but could also deliver significant open-source software contributions itself? A Muscular OSPO, or mOSPO, takes on all the responsibilities of a traditional OSPO, along with the added “muscle” of outside engineers. It’s a workable alternative for companies that either don’t have the engineering hours to spare, or can’t spare them for legal or other reasons.

In healthcare, finance, government, or other locked-down environments, for example, open-source software can present so many legal challenges that companies don’t see the value. Others may have the authorization to contribute, but know that they can’t go from zero to complete contribution without help.

Here’s why mOPSO is the next evolution in open-source

A mOSPO fills in all those gaps – it adds an “outside” engineering arm to an organization that can facilitate actual OSPO engineering efforts. With this added layer of support, the company can begin adding open-source contributions directly to their upstream projects for short-term wins, and at the same time start to change the conversation about what open-source is and how valuable it can be.

The ultimate goal is a synergy, where the larger team of engineers contribute to open-source and the mOSPO contributes work on upstream projects. It’s a winning ecosystem that hasn’t yet been fully explored, but has shown tremendous potential as we’ve shown in our work at G-Research.