Open Source Program Office (OSPO)

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Open Source Program Office (OSPO)

About OSPO

The Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is hosted at the UC Davis Library and is a node in the UC OSPO Network. We support open source development at UC Davis and across the UC system through a range of services, events and collaborations.

What is Open Source?

Open source software (OSS) refers to software that is written and released under an open source license, for example MIT, Apache, BSD. The codebase is freely available for the public to review making development transparent and collaborative.

OSS projects are developed by communities of volunteers. Heavy users that benefit from open source code are encouraged to give back by improving code, writing documentation or supporting others.

Open source software is foundational to all software development, including enterprise software. It probably even runs your car!

Community

Open source is all about community!

We have quarterly in-person events at Shields Library in Davis, and the UC OSPO network has additional cross-campus online meetups. This is a great way to learn about open source, meet like-minded developers, and grow your project engagement.

Join the conversation

UC OSPO Slack Community

Upcoming events

Get Involved in Open Source

Whether you’re new to open source or ready to contribute, we have resources to help you get started.

Learn the basics

Take a UC Davis DataLab workshop to build programming, reproducibility and workflow skills.

UC OSPO Network’s OSS Resources provides tutorials, information and best practices for contributing to open source development.

Explore opportunities to contribute

How do you find an open source project? What should you look for in a project as a contributor? How can you make strong contributions?

Join UC OSPO office hours or email Laura Langdon for help identifying an open source project to join and tips for making your pull requests count.