developer

About the Yahoo Open Source Program Office

An open source program office (OSPO) helps developers at your company successfully use, contribute, and publish open source projects. Typically OSPOs perform governance, management, support, and strategy consulting functions to support your company’s open source goals. Every company is different and their OSPOs differ too. We’ve been active participants of the TODO Group and have benefited greatly from (and contributed back to) the shared body of work about OSPOs. You can read more about their work at https://www.linuxfoundation.org/resources/open-source-guides/

Our OSPO focuses on in the following areas:
  • Publication Review and Support — We review projects and stage them for open source publication on a branded and managed GitHub organization.
  • License Compliance — We run a scan process during the build process on our mobile apps and other products to help us prepare open source display credits and ensure that our apps contain exactly what we want them to contain, and nothing else.
  • Contribution Support — We support contributions to open source projects, specifically in cases where they require a contributor license agreement to be signed or where other factors require our involvement.
  • Strategy review — We work with our technology leadership to ensure we use, contribute to, and create open source projects in a manner that will help reduce tech-debt, improve business outcomes, and support our goals to achieve engineering excellence.

By running an OSPO, we help our engineers focus on their engineering challenges, their sprints, and their products, while knowing that we have their back when it comes to questions about open source licenses, copyrights, and communities. This way fosters an open and collaborative working environment, just like you find in successful open source communities. We thrive on transparency and operate the program as an open source project encouraging collaboration and publishing all our work in the open. At Yahoo, nearly all our platforms are built upon open source projects. We strive to be an open source friendly company for engineers as we believe that together we can create the future, in the open.

We know that engineers love working at companies that support open source. We love working with engineers who embody open source principles in their work. Check out this site to see what we have published, how you can work with us, and maybe even work at Yahoo. We’re hiring.