Open Source Business Alliance
The Open Source Business Alliance - Bundesverband für digitale Souveränität e.V. is a German non-profit that operates Europe's biggest network of companies and organizations developing, building and using open source software.
OSBA focusses on German OSS topics and is organized within APELL to work on European level.
History
The alliance was founded in July 2011 in Stuttgart. The two founding associations, Linux Solutions Group e.V. and the LIVE Linux-Verband e.V., officially merged their groups at their annual general meetings on the 20th and 21 July 2011.The merger aimed to create a unified lobby group for the German open-source movement.
In 2014, a further attempted consolidation failed. The OSB Alliance and the Open Source Business Foundation first announced their intention to merge the two associations to form a single large advocacy group on 18 November 2013. After almost a year of negotiations that only achieved an agreement, the merger collapsed on 15 October 2014.
At their annual general meeting in Berlin in 2018, the association's name change to "Open Source Business Alliance - Federal Association for Digital Sovereignty" was proposed and received broad support from the members present. From the perspective of the association, open source software and open standards are necessary and essential prerequisites for digital sovereignty. The OSB Alliance has established itself as one of the mouthpieces and has been promoting and promoting the topic of "digital sovereignty" for several years. As a nationwide representative of the open source industry and users, the OSB Alliance has now expanded its name in order to make this objective more aware.
Goals
General goals
The alliance's main aims are to:- Digital Sovereignty
- Open Source
- Reducing technical lock-ins
- open standards
- Innovation
- Resilience
- Open Collaboration
- Education and enablement
- Sustainability
- Transparency
- Public Money - Public Code
Central objectives of the alliance:
- The use of open standards with manufacturer-independent, fully published, unlimited specifications
- The abolition of software patents, or alternatively, irrevocable free use of existing software patents
- Inviolability of copyright
- Action by public bodies to enable participation, i.e. open data, open innovation and open access
- Open-minds economy through public forms of cooperation in politics and business
- Net neutrality, i.e. equal treatment of all online data flows
Board
- Peter Ganten, Univention GmbH
- Lisa Seifert, DMK E-BUSINESS GmbH
- Stefan Zosel, Capgemini Deutschland GmbH
- Diego Calvo de Nó, Proventa AG
- Rico Barth, c.a.p.e. IT GmbH
- Birgit Becker, EGroupware GmbH
- Lothar Becker,.riess applications GmbH
- Holger Dyroff, ownCloud GmbH
- Elmar Geese
- Peer Heinlein, Heinlein Support GmbH
- Felix Kronlage-Dammers, Sustaining Member
- Michael Leibfried, Red Hat GmbH
- Holger Pfister, SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH
- Uwe Presler, Bechtle Systemhaus Holding AG
Working groups and projects
; WG Cloud
; WG Continuous License Compliance
; WG Education
; WG Events
; WG Procurement
; WG Public Affairs
; WG Security
Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS)
In November 2019, Rafael Laguna de la Vera, Peter Ganten, Oliver Mauss and Kurt Garloff came up with the idea of proposing a manufacturer-independent, free, federatable cloud stack for Gaia-X and develop. The idea was given the name Sovereign Cloud Stack and fell on fertile ground at BMWi and Gaia-X. SCS was integrated as a sub-working group in Gaia-X and further developed by a small team made up of Christian Berendt, Dirk Loßack and Kurt Garloff and a growing community. A feasibility study was also carried out on behalf of SPRIND and a funding application for the BMWi was drawn up for the OSB Alliance. On July 13, 2021, the OSB Alliance announced that it receives 14.9M€ funding to coordinate and fund the development of the software and the ecosystem. SCS is affiliated to the Gaia-X Provider Working Group as an Work Package. SCS uses available open source technologies such as Ceph, Prometheus, OpenStack and Kubernetes and performs the automation, configuration, integration and validation of the components in a standardized and certifiable stack. In addition to the software stack, the project focuses in particular on tools for business automation and the documentation of business processes. With Betacloud and PlusCloud Open the first productive SCS-based public clouds are already available ; further public clouds and implementations as private clouds in industry and public administration are already in progress.Lisog open source stack
| Component | Provider | Description |
| Virtual Desktop Environment | Red Hat, Topalis, Univention | |
| Web Portal | Red Hat, tarent, OpenSAGA | |
| CRM/Project management | Projectile, Information Desire Software | Customer relation management, project, program and portfolio management |
| ERP | Nuclos, HeliumV, | Enterprise Resource Planning |
| ITSM | OTRS | IT Service management |
| GW | Open-Xchange, VIPcom, Zarafa | Groupware |
| PM | Onepoint Project | Project management |
| PLM | OSSWORX | Product Lifecycle Management |
| BI | JasperSoft | Business Intelligence |
| DMS | agorum core | Document management |
| BPM | SOPERA BPM | BPMN, BPEL, BPEL4PEOPLE, Process server and monitor |
| Database | EnterpriseDB, Ingres, Postgres, GraphDB | Datenbanken |
| Application Server | JBoss, Sopera ASF | JEE Application Server, eclipseSOA WebService AppServer |
| ESB | JBoss, Sopera ASF, Mule | Enterprise Service Bus |
| Application Integration | Sopera DI | Drag & Drop ETL Data integration components |
| OpenMAPI | Topalis, Wilken, Zarafa | E-Mail, Groupware |
| e-mail archive | Benno | SMTP-based e-mail archive |
| VOIP | Asterisk, Cowic | Voice over IP |
| Linux/Hypervisor | Novell, Red Hat, Debian, Univention Corporate Server | operating systems |
| File sharing | filespots | File sharing and file converter |
| iFolder | Novell | File sharing in the cloud |
| Online Storage | RisingTide Systems | iSCSI, FCoE, FC Storage server, based on LIO Target |
| HA | Pacemaker | High availability, data mirroring |
| Backup | SEP Sesam | Backup and recovery |
| Archiv | Grau Data AG | Longterm archive OPENARCHIVE |
| Hardware | Pyramid, Boston Deutschland | Hardware for Cloud center and appliances |