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Centreon: born open source, governance and manifesto!

VincentU

Hello, I’m Vincent Untz, CTO of Centreon since 2023, and a long-time member of and contributor to the open source community.

Context

Centreon is an IT and OT monitoring solution that helps organizations ensure their infrastructure is always-on and optimize their performance. Created 20 years ago by French students, it has become a standard in the monitoring industry and is supported by the company of the same name.

Open source context

  • Centreon has been open source from the start, with 250,000 users and new users and platforms deployed daily.
  • Development continues publicly in an open-source manner.
  • The company provides proprietary modules and a SaaS solution to customers.
  • The company leadership team deeply understands open source and has fully integrated it into the business strategy.
  • Technical teams have an open source culture and heavily use open source software. We encourage participation in open source events, and some team members contribute to open source projects.
  • Some Centreon individuals are well-known in the French open source community. -The company is a member of several open source organizations, such as April and OW2.

Pain points

Although it may seem that there are no open-source-related issues within Centreon, some pain points emerged upon closer inspection:

  • The company has grown significantly in recent years, and many new employees were unfamiliar with open source and its concepts, or how it can be a competitive advantage from a business perspective.
  • Some perceived a conflict between the Centreon open source solution and the Centreon commercial solution. Occasionally, we would lose a prospect for the commercial solution to the open source solution. While still a win for Centreon, it wasn’t always perceived that way.
  • The development teams sometimes struggled to manage technical contributions from the community effectively.
  • There were weak signals from people active in the French open source community about the perception of Centreon slowly drifting away from open source.

Overall, open source was still part of daily life at Centreon, but perhaps not as prominent and not fully understood by everyone as I would have expected.

How we did it

After joining the company, I realized during discussions that not everyone was aligned on the benefits of open source or on where to put the cursor with regards to open source. We had a discussion about this within the leadership team and I had the nice surprise to see that at that level, there was no such issue. We agreed that creating a document explaining our relationship with open source would be a good step forward, and that’s how we started working on our open source manifesto.

With Pierrick Martel’s help, we quickly drafted a manifesto that explains why open source is essential in IT today, why it presents an opportunity, why it is compatible with a business like ours, and how we are proud to contribute to it. The text concludes with our explicit commitment to open source. I also wrote an open source policy as an addendum, to elaborate on technicalities such as license choice, how to contribute to our projects, how we choose to contribute upstream by default, and how we participate in the community in general.

We went back to the leadership team who approved without reservation the open source manifesto and the open source policy.

To announce the manifesto internally, we presented it at an all-hands event with a small workshop to explain how open source impacts everyone in their life, and not just at work. We also proudly display the manifesto in our office.

The next step was to share this work externally by providing it on our website (https://www.centreon.com/centreon-open-source-manifesto/) and explaining what we did and why. This included talks at events, podcasts, articles, and this testimonial!

Achievements

Creating the open source manifesto was a key event for Centreon in 2024, and has led to clear benefits:

  • A clear and unambiguous confirmation that the company and the leadership team support open source as a strategic part of Centreon.
  • Realignment of everyone in the company regarding our stance on open source, including understanding that it is part of our business strategy.
  • Feedback from the community that Centreon is no longer perceived as drifting away from open source, but is indeed contributing to the community.

The development teams are also aware of the implications of receiving contributions and are working harder to integrate them.

Centreon does not have an OSPO as such because open source has been central to the company since its inception. Our organization being “born open source”, OSS governance is in our DNA, the notion of OSPO is distributed across all roles and when we look at the GGI, usage, trust, commitment and strategy are anchored in our operation. The manifesto allows us to strengthen and give direction to our culture and we believe it is an efficient and straightforward tool for explaining how an organization interacts with open source.”

Localization in Action: Taiwan Open Culture Foundation’s Journey with GGI Handbook!

OCF_TW_team

Open Culture Foundation (OCF) has long supported Taiwan’s OSS community, promoting open-source principles among enterprises and government agencies through initiatives like OSPO and OpenChain. Notably, OCF had assisted KKCompany in obtaining Taiwan’s first ISO/IEC 5230 certification at 2022 and driven the “Public Money, Public Code” initiative by training government staff on open-source practices.

Our contribution

We’re excited to share that OCF contributed to localizing the GGI Handbook into Traditional Chinese, leveraging glossaries and technical expertise gained from our three-year localization project involving Taiwan’s government, industries, and communities. Our proficiency in integrating Weblate with Markdown to produce PDFs effectively solved font compatibility challenges between Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Additionally, we had a valuable opportunity to train translation interns from NTU’s Department of Foreign Languages, who actively collaborated in handbook translation, significantly enhancing their practical skills and community engagement. Our intern Ruei, participating in her first OSS project, was thrilled to see the handbook published!

Next …

This year, OCF will transform selected GGI handbook sections into educational materials, integrating them with our interactive “Open Starter Village” board game for engaging workshops. This combined approach helps enterprises grasp open-source collaboration concepts and formulate strategic approaches. Concurrently, we’re exploring ways to utilize handbook activities to assist Taiwanese government agencies in developing OSPO frameworks.

The structured GGI approach provides OCF with a clear roadmap, enabling us to efficiently identify organizational needs and gradually advance open-source governance—even without immediate ISO certification. We eagerly look forward to continuing to incorporate GGI insights into our workshops and regularly sharing our achievements and progress with the OSPO Alliance community!

ThalesGroup: OSPO in Action!

SebL

Hi, I am Sébastien Lejeune, Open Source Advocate at Thales working at the Group Technical Directorate.

Context

Thales is a multinational group with french roots that designs, develops and manufactures electronical systems as well as devices and equipment for the aerospace, defence, transportation and security sectors.

Open-source context:

  • Open Source Software & Hardware are strategic pillars for Thales, we want to foster collaborations between the actors of these communities through our GitHub organization: https://github.com/ThalesGroup
  • We did set an OSPO up back in 2020 and we have put in place a unified process & tooling to help collaborators to contribute to existing open source project and to share Thales assets in open source
  • Open Source is sponsored by the top management and clearly defined in the group strategy

My pain points

  1. Raise Awareness: I aimed to spread awareness about this global initiative throughout the organization.
  2. Middle Management Buy-In: My goal was to persuade middle management to actively encourage their teams to participate.
  3. Scaling Up: I sought to increase the number of contributors, both within Thales and externally.

How I did it

I joined the OSPO Alliance in 2022 and became an active committer after few months.

I instanciated the GGI board into our internal Gitlab at Thales and it helped me to have an overview about all the activities I had already achieved but also a lot of relevant resources to legitimate Thales Open Source strategy and to share them with different involved people.

Achievements since 2020

  • Established an OSPO: We created an Open Source Program Office (OSPO) to oversee our open-source efforts.
  • Streamlined Processes: We implemented tools and streamlined processes to facilitate easy asset publishing and contributions by all collaborators.
  • Comprehensive Documentation: A clear and accessible documentation was developed and shared across Thales.
  • Foundation Memberships: We expanded our affiliations with prominent open-source foundations, including Eclipse, Linux Foundation, CNCF, and OpenHardware Group.
  • Active Participation: Our involvement extended to various open-source working groups, such as Systematic Open Source Hub, Eclipse projects, CNCF projects, and the Good Governance Initiative.