Our Customer
Swiss Federal Railways SBB is a joint stock company under special law with its registered office in Bern. Its public services include passenger services an rail infrastructure. It transports over 1,160,000 people and 185’000 tonnes of freight of their destinations every day. More than 33,000 employees are passionately committed to ensuring that their customers arrive safely and on time, and do so in an environmentally friendly manner.
For many years, SBB has been working with open source software. They utilize existing solutions such as:
- Java Spring Boot: Java-framework
- PostgreSQL: Database
- Kafka: Messaging queue
- OpenShift: Kubernetes distribution by Red Hat
- 3scale: API management solution by Red Hat
- Prometheus: Monitoring
- Ansible: Configuration management They also have developed their own open source software to map out train journeys.
This latest open source software we've developed for planning and scheduling trains is the perfect tool. Not just from the end user perspective, but also from a technological perspective. It is much easier to plan regular interval timetables and let our trains run on time. Therefore, we want to share this with partner companies in other countries and let them contribute to the features.
- Jochen Decker, CIO at SBB
SBB is also developing its own open source software—one of which is used to plan long-term integrated interval timetables. SBB plans to further develop this software in cooperation with European railway companies such as SNCF and partners from universities. In order to strengthen cooperation with partners in this and other projects, SBB has founded the OpenRail Association together with SNCF, Deutsche Bahn, and UIC.
Goal
Since SBB has been working with open source and are now creating open source solutions themselves, their goal was to formalize their processes and standards on working and collaborating within the open source community. The techies of SBB were already participating and contributing to different communities, but often found themselves unsure whether they could interact or contribute, sometimes resulting in either not participating or using personal accounts to do so.
Additionally, they needed best practices for their own developed open source solution. What would a license look like? How could they work together with partners? What procedure needs to be followed when a partner adds a new feature to the solution? The goal was to create standards and a community where the four partners (SBB, ÖBB, DB, SNCF) could collaborate.
The SBB wanted to rely on a community to collaborate on the solution since others might have valuable contributions to add features. With open source SBB can do that, but it needs standards and processes.
- Jochen Decker, CIO at SBB
Solution
SBB turned to Adfinis for help. We’ve worked with SBB in the past to develop an open source solution and have participated in the open source community over the last 25 years. Therefore, we were able to help them create best practices and set up recommendations for licenses and the legal structure. It’s important to understand that open source works differently than commercial licenses. Therefore, we have helped SBB clarify how working and collaborating with open source works best.
Open source has no structure, but there are rules to follow. Particularly when you adopt a project and release something yourself, you need to know what is allowed within the license. Also, since SBB delivered its own open source solution, it needs to know how to create the license its partners need and what rules it needs to set for itself and its partners. How can others reuse what you have released and safely add features?
Part of this initiative is clarifying for software developers what is allowed and what is not. We’ve helped by creating a guide with common use cases that SBB employees can look up. In other words, how can the SBB employees be good citizens in the open source community?
Adfinis as a partner
For SBB, Adfinis' experience working with open source communities was valuable to the collaboration. With this support, SBB clarified its governance in open source and is still using Adfinis' expert knowledge to answer questions about licenses.
Want to know more about the previous projects of SBB and Adfinis? Read more here.
Even though companies have been working with an inner and open source approach for years, the practice may never have been formalized. If you want to create best practices in which techies feel supported in their open source citizenship? Or also develop your own open source solution for others to benefit from and collaborate on? Let us know, and we’ll help you set up a formalized set of standards and processes you can rely on.
