April 25, 2018

Version 0.1 is here. After a proof-of-concept, plenty of drafting, feedback and discussions, a prototype, and finally three months of development focused on creating a useful product, we are tagging a first version of Quartermaster. The theme of the first version was to implement the toolchain basics: the compliance knowledge graph, the master container, the elemental workflow with a construction, analysis and reporting phase, and the APIs for modules to interact with the knowledge graph in each of these phases. There are public showcases that demonstrate the functionality implemented so far. After gathering functional and legal requirements, the team will now move on to milestone 2, where we will focus on making use of the building blocks from the first version to implement badly needed functions of generating license compliance documentation - an SPDX manifest analyzer, integration with Fossology, and features to aggregate analysis results from different sources into reports.

Quartermaster Version 0.1

It is literally Quartermaster’s first birthday. The project was incepted at the Legal and Licensing Workshop 2017 that started on April 25, 2017 – exactly one year ago. The project had a great if turbulent first year, and now we are admiring our first version and say “Geez, this is one cute baby!” Come have a peek into the crib:





Key features

So what can you expect from Quartermaster 0.1? Compare further the architectural overview in dev update 3 – all the key elements are there. The master implements the workflow phases and manages the compliance knowledge graph. It also acts as the state machine that models the workflow into the construction, analysis and reporting phases. For each of the phases, gRPC based APIs have been designed that clients (the modules) use to communicate with the master. A first set of modules exists that covers the functions of the three phases. Build graphs can currently be generated for builds using the GNU compiler collection, and for Gradle-based Java programs. A ScanCode analysis module and a rudimentary SPDX analyzer exist that augment the knowledge graph with compliance data. A first reporting module generates static HTML from the graph that can be published on a web site or integrated into products and shipped with them. “Show me!”, you say? Sure:





There is a containerized showcase that builds curl in a Jenkins pipeline on Endocode’s CI, and then publishes the results to the package documentation section of the Quartermaster web site. This setup roughly matches a common use case – ingesting a source code package to be a dependency to a product, and in the process evaluating license compliance and creating documentation for internal or external use. It is also how we imagine communities or businesses would use Quartermaster: integrated in the regular continuous integration setup, against versioned repositories of packages, and communicating with other systems like documentation web sites, issue tracking or instant messaging.

Development workflow, governance and commercial support

This report wraps up the first milestone of Quartermaster. This will now become the rhythm of the project: Every quarter marks a timed milestone release. At the beginning of each milestone, a workshop will be held to identify and prioritize the requirements for the upcoming version, and to break them down into tasks for the development sprints. Every milestone consists of 6 sprints of two weeks each. At the end of every sprint, a public video conference will be held where the sprint results are demonstrated, and the next sprint is planned in detail.

Open Governance

Everybody interested in Quartermaster is invited to join the public sprint reviews and milestone requirements workshops (there is however limited capacity for the workshops, so make sure to register early!) The project applies an open, meritocratic governance model: our code and the roadmap including tickets are on Github, and there is an open Slack workspace that everybody is invited to join. In general, all aspects of the project are open for collaboration – it is truly Open Source.

Have some standards, please…

There are some norms though that the project applies: everything developed as part of Quartermaster is fully and completely Free and Open Source software. “Open core” models that hold back crucial functionality for an “enterprise version” are not accepted. Since the project applies a reciprocal license to it’s own code, it requires no contributor license agreement. All contributors keep the rights to their contributions. Most importantly, all knowledge generated and aggregated in the toolchain has to be submitted to the master data model under an open data license. Hoovering up FOSS compliance data to build a proprietary knowledge base is also not accepted without giving the same data back into the compliance knowledge graph maintained by Quartermaster, since we believe that this is, in fact, a part of the problem in the FOSS compliance space that we are trying to fix.

Commercial support

Every Open Source product intended for use in commercial environments needs professional services. Quartermaster separates strictly between the Open Source product, and professional services that enable businesses to learn, adopt and deploy Quartermaster.

With the release of version 0.1, Endocode begins to offer support contracts, training, custom development and consulting in the form of professional services packages for Quartermaster. We hope that with the further success of the project, more Open Source minded businesses will begin offering professional services and help making Quartermaster the default toolchain for FOSS compliance documentation.

The road to version 0.2

If you dig through the documentation generated by the showcase, you may notice that there are still plenty of gaps at the version level. As every newborn, ours is still learning to walk, talk and then to go hang out and party with the other 2 year olds. If the theme of version 0.1 was “the workflow toolchain”, the theme of milestone two will be “compliance documentation”. On April 11, 2018 we held the milestone 2 requirements workshop. During the Legal and Licensing Workshop 2018 last week, participants gave feedback and identified more requirements. This input was poured into a milestone roadmap roughly represented by the tickets in the QMSTR super repository. After some housekeeping, we will implement implement SPDX metadata handling for analysis, and extend the current reporting modules. Some effort will be invested into creating an automated integration testing environment to ensure the stability of the toolchain. Details for the final three sprints will be identified as we go (or maybe based on your feedback?). Expect version 0.2 in early July, and the next requirements workshop for version 0.3 in mid July 2018.

How to participate and how to help

Quartermaster is currently being developed mainly by Endocode with the support of Siemens, Google and the Linux Foundation. Since the project is completely Open Source, it needs your support. Any help is welcome: We appreciate your code contributions, your feedback and your domain knowledge. Enterprises that plan on using Quartermaster should consider financially supporting the project through a grant. Grants can be handled with the help of Linux Foundation or directly to the project. All grants will be invested into contributions to the project. Please contact the project if you are able to provide financial support or for any other inquiries.

The next Quartermaster community hangout will take place on April 25, 2018 at 4pm CEST. Feel free to join.

We are considering organising a Quartermaster hackfest, potentially colocated with a major Open Source conference. If you are interested in attending, hosting or sponsoring such a hackfest, please let us know so that can start making plans.

Thank You Notes

Quartermaster is a community project, and would not have been possible without the help of some key supporters that we are deeply grateful to:

Siemens and Google, for providing guidance with domain knowledge, setting requirements and financial support,

the Linux Foundation, for helping to establish the project and creating connections, presentation opportunities and for administrative support in handling grants to the project.

Thank you very much for all your help, without you this first release would not have been possible! We are looking forward to celebrating many more releases like this one!

Title image: Will Clayton, “Birthday Cake”, CC BY 2.0 Thanks for sharing!