Highlights of the SAP Open Source 2022 report

Fempel · ‎12-12-2022

It is December again, so everyone is busy like in no other season of the year. Whether it is working on a long backlog list in Jira or finally crossing something off from your to-do list that you keep putting off. And as another year is ending, it is also time to look back on what we have achieved in 2022. Let me share some highlights of the SAP Open Source 2022 report. The report delivers condensed information about many different open-source projects and collaborations and is a great overview on SAP’s open-source engagement. Let me give you a glimpse of what you can expect in this report.

It was recently announced at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas, that the SAP Cloud Programming Model (aka CAP) has gone open source with some repositories. Node.js GraphQL adapter is the beginning of the CAP open-source journey and is probably one of the most popular repositories published in 2022. Our report provides a list of featured projects, which were open sourced in 2022, that are useful for many different areas, whether for security experts, the UI5 community, or innovators in the field of e-mobility.

What started as a little seed in 2021, the Open Documentation Initiative has grown in repositories and great collaborative documentation, as a good example that open source is not only about code.

In addition to the 2022 milestones of SAP’s already popular Gardener, Kyma, and OpenUI5 projects, we have a section on SAP’s contributions and growing internal communities to projects such as Rust, Metaflow-Argo, or Gerrit Code Review (just to name a few).

The open-source world would not be what it is today without the many foundations that foster collaboration and support great projects with their expertise. The report includes interesting highlights of SAP’s role and activities in Catena-X (the first open and collaborative data ecosystem for the automotive value chain). SAP, for instance, provides expertise in the areas of authentication, authorization, and audit logging to the Product Eclipse Dataspace Connector (Product EDC) open-source project and is involved in the Catena-X consortium in different workstreams and open-source projects.

For those of you who are into cloud native computing and Kubernetes, Flux, a recently graduated GitOps project at CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), might ring a bell. You will probably agree with Frank Heine and Vasu Chandrasekhara, quoted recently by CNCF, that thanks to Flux, the Gardener community can now automate their Kubernetes workflows with true GitOps.

If you are more interested in the topic of open-source compliance and governance, you should read about the latest steps SAP took to certify for OpenChain conformance (ISO/IEC 5230). You will find the why and how of getting certified with OpenChain. And if your company is looking into this certification as well, links to podcasts and webinars might give you some very personal insights from Peter Giese (SAP Open Source Program Office) and Shane Coughlan (OpenChain General Manager at the Linux Foundation).

The 2022 report provides an overview on different channels and assets to learn more about open source or how to get engaged: Podcasts with internal and external open-source enthusiasts, or webinars with experts. Maybe you would like to use your next train or car ride to listen to a podcast with Dawn Foster from VMware about open source as a driver of innovation. There are many ways to empower our ecosystem and open-source community, and share information. At SAP we use Wikis for documentation and different channels for open discussions, we have a new SAP Community page for interaction with the external SAP ecosystem and of course the projects mentioned in the report are all linked to their repos on GitHub or respective platforms.

Did you know that quite a few open-source projects initiated by SAP, such as Piper, started their journey as InnerSource projects? If you are wondering how SAP drives InnerSource and supports development teams with InnerSource projects, the last chapter of the report will give you some insights.

With the SAP Open Source Report 2022, we would like to encourage you to find projects to use, share, and contribute!

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