Open Source Business Alliance

More than 270 companies belong to the Open Source Business Alliance, and individuals can join as private supporting members, several of whom sit on the extended board. Members meet in working groups on procurement, cloud, continuous license compliance, open source in municipalities, public affairs and security. Task forces cover the Cyber Resilience Act, artificial intelligence and open source in business and industry.

The working groups also give members a frame for joint projects, joint marketing and consortia that bid for public contracts together. At the online Members & Products sessions, member companies present their software to the other members and to guests.

Peter H. Ganten, co-founder and co-managing director of the software company Univention, was first elected chair of the OSBA in November 2011 and leads its board today. Daniel Gerber and Stefan Zosel of Capgemini Deutschland are deputy chairs, and Diego Calvo de Nó of Proventa is chief financial officer on the executive board. The extended board has eleven more members, among them managers from SUSE, Bechtle, Heinlein Support and EGroupware.

The registered office of the association is at Pariser Platz 6a in 10117 Berlin, next to the Brandenburg Gate. The office in Berlin coordinates all requests from members and acts as the link to politics and public administration.

Since 1 January 2025 the Forum SCS-Standards within the OSBA has been responsible for developing and quality-assuring the stack, after the federal funding ended. Its supporters include cloud providers and integrators such as Cloud&Heat, Dataport, OSISM, ScaleUp Technologies, secunet, SysEleven, noris network and plusserver. The stack rests on certifiable standards, the modular software, and documentation that the providers share in open collaboration.

The clouds certified as SCS-compatible include Cloud&Heat IaaS, ScaleUp Open Cloud, CNDS Public Cloud and REGIO.cloud by OSISM for infrastructure services. For Kubernetes, the certified offers include noris Sovereign Cloud, ScaleUp Open Cloud and Syself Autopilot.

Open cloud stacks matter to banks and insurers because of the outsourcing rules of financial supervision. The Digital Operational Resilience Act requires financial firms to keep a cloud exit strategy for ICT services that support critical functions, and the Data Act gives cloud customers a right to switch providers. Where several certified providers run the same standardized stack, a bank can plan a move between them with less rework than a move away from a single proprietary platform.

The political work of the OSBA concentrates on public IT and on the rules under which authorities buy software. The association calls for open source to become the standard in public procurement, research and business promotion, and it runs a forum for digital sovereignty on open source in the public sector. On the planned EU Public Procurement Act, the OSBA submitted a statement at the invitation of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, asking that the new rules strengthen digital sovereignty through open source.

The OSBA goes back to two older associations, the LIVE Linux-Verband founded in 1997 and the Linux Solutions Group (Lisog) founded in 2005. Their members decided in July 2011 to merge under the name OSB Alliance, with effect from 1 January 2011. At a members meeting in Berlin in 2019 the association chose its current name, which puts digital sovereignty into its title, and in 2022 it opened its own office.

Every autumn the OSBA invites members and guests to OSBA Connect in Berlin, its annual networking event. Parliamentary breakfasts bring the open source industry together with politicians, and the event calendar of the association also includes the Sovereign Cloud Days and the it-sa security fair in Nuremberg.