The Open Source Way

How does SAP approach open source, and how is it perceived by the global open source community?  In this episode of  The Open Source Way , host Karsten Hohage sits down with Sebastian Wolf, Head of SAP’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO), and Orlin Vasilev, Open Source and Cloud Native Technology Advocate at SAP, to discuss SAP’s evolving open source strategy and its growing role in the global ope...

What is SSL and how does secure internet communication work? In this episode, we explore SSL, encryption basics, and the story behind OpenSSL—from early web security to modern open-source cryptography. In this episode, we break down SSL, TLS, encryption, and secure communication in a simple, practical way, while exploring the history and impact of OpenSSL—one of the most widely used open-source se...

Cloud Foundry after Kubernetes: How a lighter community process, growing contributions, and a new path to Kubernetes are shaping the platform’s next chapter. In this episode of the Open Source Way podcast, Karsten speaks with Beyhan Veli about the current evolution of Cloud Foundry and the community behind it. They discuss how the project reorganized its contributor processes to make onboarding ea...

In this episode, we delve into the intricacies of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) within the SAP ecosystem, a pivotal component designed to offer domain expertise to LLMs. Join our host alongside Tim Back and Florian Vogt as we unpack the role and significance of MCP in the SAP ecosystem in the world of AI. Guests: Florian Vogt (LinkedIn) and on GitHub Tim Back Show Notes: UI5 MCP Server Blogpost...

In this episode of The Open Source Way , Karsten Hohage chats with Sonja Lienard, Senior Vice President and Head of ABAP Platform at SAP SE. They delve into Sonja’s professional journey, her contributions to ABAP development, and the significant role open source technologies play at SAP. The discussion covers Sonja’s involvement with various programming languages, the integration of Eclipse IDE an...

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks with our guests Juergen Walter, Pallavi Priyadarshini and Karsten Schnitter about OpenSearch. OpenSearch is an open-source search, analytics and observability suite which has been enhanced with significant AI capabilities.  This episode showcases SAP’s current use of OpenSearch for observability on their Business Technology Platform and the project’s...

In this episode Karsten Hohage, Johannes Ott and Maximilian Techritz talk about Open Managed Control Planes – an open source project that allows you to orchestrate any aspect of a cloud landscape using one declarative API. Johannes Ott and Maximilian Techritz, who are both software engineers at SAP, talk about Open Managed Control Planes – an open source project that allows you to orchestrate any...

In this episode, Karsten Hohage talks about QEMU with Helge Deller from SAP and Alex Bennée from Linaro. QEMU, short for “Quick Emulator”, is a virtualization software that can be used to emulate various types of hardware. They discuss the open source aspects of QEMU, how it is used in various aspects of the software development lifecycle, and how it helps the software ecosystem. Guests: Helge Del...

In this episode, Karsten Hohage and Siegfried Kiermayer, a cloud architect at SAP Commerce, discuss governance issues and solutions in open source projects.   The host Karsten Hohage, and guest Siegfried Kiermayer, cloud architect at SAP Commerce, talk about governance issues and solutions in open source projects, using projects like Catena-X and Tractus-X as an example. Starting with the basis of...

In this episode Karsten Hohage and Thiago Weber Martins, the product manager for AAS Digital Twins at SAP, take a deep dive into the Asset Administration Shell. The host Karsten Hohage converses with Thiago Weber Martins, the product manager for AAS Digital Twins at SAP, about the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). Thiago takes us on a journey about what the AAS is, what the standards are, and wher...

A dive into the basics of InnerSource Commmons, the worlds largest community of InnerSource advocates. In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Danese Cooper, Guilherme Dellagustin (SAP), and Russ Rutledge about InnerSource Commons. Founded in 2015, InnerSource Commons is the worlds largest community of InnerSource advocates. InnerSource Commons provides knowledge, best pratices, challenge...

A little time jump into the past when Christoph Roland and Harald Kuck ported SAP software stack to Linux. In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Christoph Roland (former SAP) and Harald Kuck (SAP) about the past – when they both ported SAP software stack to Linux back in the 90s. Today Linux provides an open-source-based operating system infrastructure for SAP solutions. In the podcast...

What is CAP Operator, what are its main features, and how does it function? In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Sathyajith Krishnan (SAP) and Pavan Nayak (SAP) about CAP Operator – which deploys and manages the lifecycle of multi-tenant  SAP Cloud Application Programming Model  applications and related components, based on SAP BTP golden path, within a Kubernetes cluster. Sathyajith a...

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Florian Wilhelm (SAP) about Project Garden Linux – a lightweight, secure Linux distribution optimized for cloud-native environments and container workloads, offering minimal footprint and high performance. Florian also explains what the ‘new Linux’ is, why it’s needed and why the new Linux is of interest for open source, the community and for SAP. G...

What is Open Resource Discovery (ORD) and how can it be used and implemented inside SAP and beyond? In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Simon Heimler (SAP) about Open Resource Discovery (ORD) – a protocol that allows applications and services to self-describe their exposed resources and capabilities. Simon explains in more detail what ORD is, how it’s used and where at SAP we already...

Introducing abapGit – an open source Git client. In this Podcast episode, we explain and discuss what abapGit is, how it works, what it’s needed for, and how it can be used. In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Michael Schneider and Marc Bernard about abapGit – an open source Git client developed for the ABAP server to import and export objects between ABAP systems. In the discussion,...

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage discusses the European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) with Mirko Boehm, Mike Milinkovich, and Sebastian Wolf. Our guests explain what the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is and why it is important to virtually everyone in the EU and anyone who wants to do business in the European market. What has the journey of the CRA been until now, and what are the next steps in the...

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage discusses open source and InnerSource at universities with our guest Clare Dillon. Clare explains how collaborative, community-driven approaches to open-source development at universities result in greater knowledge sharing, but also what the academia-specific challenges to open approaches are. This episode will help you gain insight into the evolving open sour...

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks to Powen Shiah and Mirko Swillus about the Sovereign Tech Fund. Established in 2022, it focuses on critical infrastructure in the public interest with the goal of supporting development, improvement, and maintenance of open-source components in digital infrastructure. The funding comes from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate...

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks to Max Mehl and Sebastian Wolf about Software Bills of Materials or SBOMs. An SBOM is a detailed record of all components within a software application, including open-source libraries, third-party dependencies and licenses. Max and Sebastian discuss the importance of SBOMs as well as some challenges and unanswered questions of the state of the art. T...

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks to Thomas Barber about project “Foxhound”, an SAP-maintained fork of Firefox (the web browser) that is designed to detect security vulnerabilities in websites. Thomas discusses the history of “Foxhound”, how and why it was created, and its journey to becoming an open-source project. He talks about the importance of the collaborations that made Foxhoun...

In this episode our host Karsten Hohage talks to Ana Jiménez Santamaria about the TODO Group, a community dedicated to sharing knowledge, collaborating on practices, tools, and other ways to run effective Open Source Program Offices and similar initiatives. They discuss its history, mission, working mode, and how TODO Group provides a platform to connect peers and enables them to collaborate on pr...

OCM is an extensible standard accompanied by a toolset designed to enable the automation of many software-lifecycle-related processes. It can be defined as a common machine-readable format for describing software components, which serves as a Software Bill of Delivery (SBoD). In this episode, our guests Jason Kafka and Ingo Kober discuss with host Karsten Hohage about OCM and why it is run as open...

Dear listener, we typically have a summer break in August, but this year we will do it in July. We will be back with an episode for you at the last Wednesday of August. If you are craving for open source content from us, check out the recordings of our public webinars at  https://webinars.sap.com/ospo-webinar-series/en/webinar-replays !

Credential Digger is an SAP Open-Source code scanner for detecting hardcoded secrets. In this episode, Slim Trabelsi discusses with host Karsten Hohage what led to the creation of Credential Digger and about its key differentiators. Slim also speaks of the early challenges of scanning for secrets, and lists the many advantages of using open source for building and maintaining Credential Digger. Op...