The Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Roadmap. Live now.
Cancel a proprietary software contract and the software goes. The work it was quietly doing does not.
That license fee was never only for the product. It also paid for people to keep the whole thing safe, legal, and pointed in the right direction. Leave the vendor and that work does not leave with it. It lands on you, unnamed and easy to miss.
Digital sovereignty is gaining momentum. The public sector is leading it; most large private companies are still watching from the sidelines. But the conversation has moved past whether to do this. The hard question now is how, especially with open source, where the vendor who used to handle all of it is the one you just walked away from. The software is ready. What is missing is a clear answer to who does the work underneath it once the vendor is gone.
Say "Open Source Program Office" in a meeting and watch the room tense up. I have sat in those rooms. People hear a new department, headcount, a budget that never gets approved, and the whole thing gets pushed to next year. But the office is just a label for the work, and the work does not wait for a department to exist.
So I built something that sets the work out plainly. It went live today.
The Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Roadmap maps the jobs you take on when you start running your own technology. There are four. Deciding what your organization standardizes on. Staying on the right side of licenses and the law. Keeping everything patched and secure. And the one almost everyone skips: giving back to the open projects you now depend on. Let them weaken and your systems are the ones exposed. This protects you more than it helps them. Each job runs from the first small step to a fully built-out practice, so you see the whole road and not just the tile in front of you.
Some of these jobs you will keep in-house. Others you will hand to a partner. Either way, you have to see the whole list before you can split it. The tool works the same for a five-person team and a five-thousand-person agency, public sector or private. You mark where you honestly stand on each job, watch the picture fill in, save it, and share it with the colleague who owns the next piece. No login, no email. It all runs in your browser.
This is a first version, and there is more coming. For now I would love for you to try it and tell me where it falls short: what is missing, what could be clearer, what breaks. Ideas and bug reports are just as welcome.
It is the second free tool on OpenTechHub, after the Digital Sovereignty Self-Assessment. That one shows you where you stand. This one shows you what you have to own. Neither will do the work for you. But you cannot hand out a job nobody can see, and this puts the whole list where you can look at it and start putting names against it.
