Reviewing the legal qualities of a software package, or validation as we call it, is conventionally carried out by each company separately for their own use. Since the bulk of this work is pretty much the same for any user or redistributor, the same effort ends up being repeated over and over again.
Founded in 2008, the major idea behind Validos was to enable organizations to co-operate in their validation and compliance efforts. Instead of each organization validating each component separately, this could be done together, only once per component, sharing the results and instructions with the other participants. Further, instead of each organization developing their open source licensing compliance policies, guidelines and internal resources in isolation, we could share insights, documentation and best practices to help everybody carry out compliance more effectively.
More than fifteen years later, having analyzed thousands of open source components more and being tens of thousands of hours wiser on all aspects of evolving open source compliance, Validos is still going strong. During these years, the use of open source has exploded, and we are facing a future where not automating and streamlining open source compliance is no longer a viable option. With a firm footing in best practices, we believe Validos is in a good position to support its members facing these challenges. Learn more about Validos membership.