Reflections on our experience moving to open source pan-pharma code collaboration on clinical trial reporting tools

Abstract

How do we navigate governance of a package’s production branch when we collaborate externally, and does it matter how the copyright is shared under different licences? What are the bounds of ‘pre/post competitive’ intellectual property? What is the benefit of open source over closed source pan-pharma collaboration? How can we recruit collaborators, and build trust to use code we may not own the roadmap on? What contracts, guidance and tools are missing, and how do we resource contributions to business critical shared open source codebases?In this presentation I will reflect on our journey and learnings as we tackled these questions and defined our internal open source strategy and guidance. This has become a pivotal discussion, as our organisation shifts our focus to building a codebase based on open source languages, executed in open source environments.

James Black

PhD (Cantab)

James Black. Kiwi | Epidemiologist | Data Scientist | Engineering enthusiast.