The Open Source Way

Johannes Ott and Maximilian Techritz, who are both software engineers at SAP, talk about Open Managed Control Planes – an open source project that allows you to orchestrate any aspect of a cloud landscape using one declarative API. This is made possible by harmonizing different open source tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Johannes and Maximilian will show why this project solves reoccurring challenges in enterprises, how it works and what organizations need to get started.

Karsten Hohage talks about QEMU with Helge Deller, SAP and Alex Bennée, Linaro. QEMU, short for “Quick Emulator”, is a virtualization software that can be used to emulate various types of hardware. They discuss the open source aspects of QEMU and how it is used in various aspects of the software development lifecycle.

Our host, Karsten Hohage and guest, Siegfried Kiermayer, cloud architect at SAP Commerce, talk about governance issues and solutions in open source projects, using projects like Catena-X and Tractus-X as an example. Starting with the basis of what these projects are, they will go into detail on how the projects are managed with time throughout the episode.

The host Karsten Hoage and with Thiago Weber Martins – the product manager for AAS Digital Twins at SAP about the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). Thiago takes you on a journey about what the ASS is, what the standards are and where ASS and digital twins are used. Together they also talk about the original idea and goals of digital twins and how these developed over time.

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Danese Cooper, Guilherme Dellagustin (SAP), and Russ Rutledge about InnerSource Commons. Founded in 2015, InnerSource Commons is the worlds largest community of InnerSource advocates. InnerSource Commons provides knowledge, best pratices, challenges, and solutions related to InnerSource for organizations and individuals.

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Christoph Roland (former SAP) and Harald Kuck (SAP) about the past – when they both ported SAP software stack to Linux back in the 90s. Today Linux provides an open-source-based operating system infrastructure for SAP solutions. In the podcast Christoph and Harald share anecdotes and insides from the very beginning of Open Source and SAP.

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Sathyajith Krishnan (SAP) and Pavan Nayak(SAP) talk about CAP Operator – which deploys and manages the lifecycle of multi-tenant SAP Cloud Application Programming Model applications and related components, based on SAP BTP golden path, within a Kubernetes cluster. Sathyajith and Pavan explain the main features of CAP Operator and share an overview of the major automation steps handled by CAP Operator during the deployment of the application.

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Florian Wilhelm (SAP) about Project Garden Linux – a lightweight, secure Linux distribution optimized for cloud-native environments and container workloads, offering minimal footprint and high performance. Florian also explains what the ‘new Linux’ is, why it’s needed and why the new Linux is of interest for open source, the community and for SAP.

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Simon Heimler (SAP) about Open Resource Discovery (ORD) – a protocol that allows applications and services to self-describe their exposed resources and capabilities. Simon explains in more detail what ORD is, how it’s used and where at SAP we already use ORD or plan to use it in the future. As the platform is an open standard by SAP geared towards the SAP ecosystem, how do we ensure a correct adoption of ORD at SAP? And how can it be helpful for individuals outside of SAP?

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Michael Schneider and Marc Bernard about abapGit – an open source Git client developed for the ABAP server to import and export objects between ABAP systems. In the discussion, Marc explains the basics of abapGit, and how it works. He also shares what abapGit is needed for, and how it can be used. Michael gives us some insights about SAP’s involvement in the development of abapGit and invites the listeners to explore more ABAP open source projects.

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage discusses the European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) with Mirko Boehm, Mike Milinkovich, and Sebastian Wolf. Our guests explain what the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is and why it is important to virtually everyone in the EU and anyone who wants to do business in the European market. What has the journey of the CRA been until now, and what are the next steps in the evolution of CRA? How will the CRA impact the consumption and contribution of Open Source Software?

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage discusses open source and InnerSource at universities with our guest Clare Dillon. Clare explains how collaborative, community-driven approaches to open-source development at universities result in greater knowledge sharing, but also what the academia-specific challenges to open approaches are. This episode will help you gain insight into the evolving open source landscape in academia and how it differs from other parts of the OSS ecosystem.

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks to Powen Shiah and Mirko Swillus about the Sovereign Tech Fund. Established in 2022, it focuses on critical infrastructure in the public interest with the goal of supporting development, improvement, and maintenance of open-source components in digital infrastructure. The funding comes from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz), as investing in digital commons strengthens innovation, economic competition, and democracy.

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks to Max Mehl and Sebastian Wolf about Software Bills of Materials or SBOMs. An SBOM is a detailed record of all components within a software application, including open-source libraries, third-party dependencies and licenses. Max and Sebastian discuss the importance of SBOMs as well as some challenges and unanswered questions of the state of the art. They also speak with Karsten about SBOMs within SAP and Deutsche Bahn and the importance of SBOMs when it comes to open source.

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks to Thomas Barber about project “Foxhound”, an SAP-maintained fork of Firefox (the web browser) that is designed to detect security vulnerabilities in websites. Thomas discusses the history of “Foxhound”, how and why it was created, and its journey to becoming an open-source project. He talks about the importance of the collaborations that made Foxhound successful and about some of the challenges that it has faced along the way. Anyone who wants to get involved in this project is welcome to visit the GitHub page to learn more.

In this episode our host Karsten Hohage talks to Ana Jiménez Santamaria about the TODO Group, a community dedicated to sharing knowledge, collaborating on practices, tools, and other ways to run effective Open Source Program Offices and similar initiatives. They discuss its history, mission, working mode, and how TODO Group provides a platform to connect peers and enables them to collaborate on projects that promote the integration of strategic open-source practices within different organizations. Everyone is welcome to join the TODO mission and contribute to the continuous development of best practices.

OCM is an extensible standard accompanied by a toolset designed to enable the automation of many software-lifecycle-related processes. It can be defined as a common machine-readable format for describing software components, which serves as a Software Bill of Delivery (SBoD). In this episode, our guests Jason Kafka and Ingo Kober discuss with host Karsten Hohage about OCM and why it is run as open source. Jason and Ingo also talk about their vision for OCM’s future, its applications, and its challenges.

Summer Break 2023 - We'll be back in August!

Credential Digger is an SAP Open-Source code scanner for detecting hardcoded secrets. In this episode, Slim Trabelsi discusses with host Karsten Hohage what led to the creation of Credential Digger and about its key differentiators. Slim also speaks of the early challenges of scanning for secrets, and lists the many advantages of using open source for building and maintaining Credential Digger. Open source comes with visibility for customers, and contributors can work on a project even before they join the team or after they leave, leading to improved continuity and a better tool overall.

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks with Johannes Bechberger, who is an open-source developer at SAP. They discuss why and how Johannes promotes his work on SapMachine, OpenJDK, and profiling through blogging, speaking at conferences, and having a presence on social media. Johannes also shares tips and learnings collected on his journey of “doing good and talking about it”.