Strengthening Open Innovation and Open Source Projects with Software Protection
Wibu-Systems, a pioneer and international champion in secure license and entitlement management for industrial systems, has joined OSADL, the Open Source Automation Development Lab, a cooperative dedicated to providing everything needed to use open source software in industrial products.
OSADL coordinates the development and funding of open source projects on behalf of its members, who enjoy many benefits, including quality assurance, software development, technology support, legal compliance, marketing, training, and above all support in licensing in the form of legal support through the OSADL general counsel, auditing, and certification. The success of OSADL can be attributed to its core concept: the proprietary information of its members stays confidential, and only the bits that everyone needs and that do not play a role in the competition among them are developed and provided in open collaboration.
Wibu-Systems envisages multiple fronts of cooperation with OSADL:
- With almost three decades in the service of state-of-the-art software protection, licensing, and security techniques, the company can share its wealth of knowledge with the developing network of OSADL. Best practices in the use of CodeMeter, its flagship technology, against counterfeiting, reverse engineering, and tampering, and for versatile license lifecycle management will help monetize the know-how of the entire OSADL community.
- Wibu-Systems also counts on the expertise of the OSADL ecosystem to raise the quality of its own code. A dedicated test center, the OSADL QA farm, continuously monitors a large variety of variables of far more than hundred systems to obtain maximum runtime stability. The QA tests include early recognition of an erroneous behavior of the Linux kernel, memory leaks, driver misbehavior, and unsatisfying worst-case latencies on a wide bandwidth of products of various manufacturers with different architectures (x86, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS), bit widths (32, 64 bit), and processor topologies (from single up to 32-core).
Oliver Winzenried, CEO and founder of Wibu-Systems, believes this step will complement the quality assurance efforts already covered by other programs the company has signed up for, like Microsoft, where it has achieved a Gold competency in Windows and devices, or QNX, Wind River, Apple, Adobe, Autodesk, and Oracle. He believes: “Whether retrofitting established embedded systems, PLCs, and microcontrollers for the digital transformation or creating new IoT devices, open source can be a viable alternative for sharing the burden of cost and labor. The underlying principles of cybersecurity and monetization, quality and compliance, standardization and interoperability apply to both proprietary and open source software.”
Carsten Emde, General Manager of OSADL, says: “Here at OSADL, we are very glad that Wibu-Systems decided to join our community and help our members cope with one of the key challenges of the next generation of cyber-physical systems: Security. Although the licenses of Open Source software and proprietary software are certainly different, both types of software need protection against unwanted intrusion, abuse, and manipulation. This is where Wibu-Systems can come into play: The products of Wibu-Systems work equally well in proprietary and Open Source software, and they will help manufacturers safeguard the intellectual property and integrity of their applications.”