OSPO

The OSPO’s goals align with the 2018 software strategy which is divided into five different areas.

1. Acceleration of Software Delivery and Focus on Core Differentiation

• Leverage open standards and broadly adopted OSS for innovation and time-to-market while reducing work on commodity non-differentiating software. Focus resources on key areas of differentiation for Comcast. (Framework for OSS Consumption)
• Enable faster ecosystem building by open sourcing key APIs and platforms. Build active community around them. While this has historically not been the way we have gone to market, we should pilot this with a small program in the IoT or connected home space to speed our support for more devices in the home. (Framework for OSS Contribution)
  
  

2. Improve Cost Efficiency and Reduce Operating Expenses

• Reduce cost of commercial SW (Part of procurement process) (OSS Fellowship)
• Leverage external communities two ways: first on Comcast open sourced projects develop active external contributors (external engineering) and in secondly, actively participate and influence direction of external projects through contribution (leadership). (Community Building, External Communications)
• There is a potential to speed and reduce recruitment costs and make Comcast the best place for software developers to work through enlightened policies, recruiting contributors to Comcast OSS projects, visible open source leadership and engagement. (External Communications)
  
  

3. Engineering Effectiveness and Complex Systems

• Reduce friction and run a highly effective and automated OSAC (Open Source Advisory Council) process to drive timely and the right OSS contributions.
• Organize Quarterly Education series such as OSDay and webinars to accelerate OSS competency and culture shift for TPX engineers (Culture Transformation)
• Awards and development projects for OSS Competency building (OSS Awards, OSAC, SOC, Internships, Fellowships) (Culture Transformation)
• Publish OSS Metrics to drive change and recognize achievements – Biannual Metrics around OSP effectiveness and OSS @ Comcast effectiveness
  
  

4. Software Quality including Reliability and Security

• Drive and enable the integration of compliance and static analysis tools for licenses into CI/CD (Compliance Engineering Project)
• Partner with security on guidelines around external contributions and open source consumption (OSAC, GitHub Policy, OSS Guidelines)
• Adopt Upstream First policy (Citation 2) to ensure that projects do not bear the burden of technical debt, improve ability to take advantage of security and innovation from the main-line and to ensure things get fixed once upstream.
• Default to Public on GHE repos in the company and make it easy to reuse code, collaborate on common code and reduce duplication (Inner Source). Inner Source can also be a good way to prepare a project for eventually going open. Help with priority inversion, onboarding new developers, reducing duplication, collaboration on common code.
• Start with open in mind when creating new code to build better documentation, modularization, onboarding, collaboration into the software.
  
  

5. Open Communities

• Create and nurture Internal communities around key projects and competencies (slack, meetups, webinars) (Inventory of Key dependencies)
• Build healthy and active community building for Comcast open sourced projects. (Community Building)
• Drive clear strategy around participation in projects such as CNCF, ONAP or LNF, IP Video Workflow, IoT State Machines (Sheens), OpenChain
• Multi-Cloud Standards: CNCF or the Cloud Native Compute Foundation has become a key place for standardizing hybrid cloud development and deployment. It aligns with our hybrid cloud strategy and enables us to use well accepted standards and practices for cloud deployments. Our strategy here is to be a member, listen and learn to enable use and to drive vendor selection and roadmaps especially cloud vendors. To contribute where it makes sense any enhancements or changes we make for use in our environment. Because of the extent of use across Comcast, we will create active and coordinated communities inside the company through SLACK, User Groups and active sharing of developments.
• Open Networking Movement: As more of the networking space becomes software defined, virtualized and open, it is a key opportunity for us to drive direction and vendors supporting this work. It is also a key opportunity for us to leverage the work as it makes sense to become more agile at deploying new services and to manage a complex and large network. LNF or Linux Networking Fund is an umbrella project for all OSS networking projects such as SDN, VNF, Orchestration and Automation. Networking is not as far along in moving to OSS and because of the criticality of our core networks to our business, the focus of the networking team is on stability and maintaining the core network and not make any dramatic changes. Comcast will be involved in user groups and be a member of LNF to listen, learn and drive vendor strategy. Any new implementations will be through vendor supported implementations for now and not direct consumption or contribution to the open networking projects. In non-critical areas, the networking team is consuming OSS tools and is driving use cases and contribution in OpenConfig and goBGP.
• Invest and protect against vendor weaknesses in key areas such as IP Video Today most of the workflow in IP Video is proprietary and with more of the vendors being acquired or going out of business, the imperative is to strengthen and move to an OSS based workflow. We have identified projects such as FFmpeg, x264 and x265 as well as I-smash that we know are the right ones and we plan to strengthen these OSS equivalents by code contributions, SOWs, Innovation fund and memberships
• Ecosystem Building in Connected Home: IoT State Machines – New Project from the Product Group under Adam Hertz. Strategy TBD. Little and Big Sheen are automation engines that hosts messaging-processing state machines (https://github.com/Comcast/sheens/blob/master/README) at the edge that enables communication and decision making based on various states. It has already been open sourced by Comcast. We believe that making it a standard or a widely adopted standard enables more devices or partners to join us on this platform and it is also a need that the IoT community has. Currently the goal is to create a vibrant neutral ecosystem
• Compliance Leadership and Collaboration: OpenChain is a key industry initiative to create specs, processes and learning around compliance. As compliance is a key deliverable and focus for the OSP, we want to be at the table implementing best practices and to contribute and drive needs for reference tool and process standardization and simplifications. There are many tools and many incomplete processes in compliance that need some cohesion and coordination. It will help Comcast and will help us contribute our learnings to the community at large.
• Go Broad and Open with RDK

Key Initiatives#

In order to achieve our goals, we are currently working on the following initiatives:

1. OSAC Process and Open Source Guidelines
2. Framework for choosing OSS
3. Framework for Contributing to OSS
4. Compliance Engineering for Customer Facing Apps and devices
5. Strategic and Comcast Project Community Engagement and Building
6. Procurement Process Engagement
7. External Communications and Social Media – Technology Brand Building
8. Culture Transformation through OSS Development Opportunities, Education and Awards
9. Metrics
10. InnerSource