What is OSPO?
OSPO (Open Source Program Office) is the dedicated organization responsible for managing open source within a company. Various departments including technology, legal, and infrastructure collaborate to establish open source policies, execute them, and manage community relationships.
SK Telecom’s OSPO serves as a bridge connecting developers and the legal team while pursuing two core missions. First, it supports developers in maximizing the benefits of open source. Second, it effectively manages legal risks related to licenses and security stemming from open source usage. Through this approach, SK Telecom ensures that open source adoption becomes a strategic and responsible decision rather than merely a technical choice.
Key Roles of SK Telecom’s OSPO
1. Strategic Planning
OSPO’s first responsibility is establishing corporate open source strategy. This goes beyond simply creating policies—it involves strategically managing the company’s entire open source utilization and continuously improving it. OSPO establishes and regularly refines the company’s open source policies, analyzes development teams’ open source usage patterns, and creates future plans. Additionally, OSPO provides mid-to-long-term open source roadmaps, enabling the organization to systematically leverage open source.
2. Education and Guidance
OSPO’s second responsibility is providing open source education and guidance to developers and the broader organization. For developers to properly use and contribute to open source, they must understand licenses, compliance, security, and related topics. OSPO delivers regular open source training for developers, establishes clear policies and guidance on usage, contribution, and release, and ensures all developers consistently manage open source. Additionally, OSPO provides compliance checklists and templates to simplify the review process.
3. Community Management
OSPO’s third responsibility is managing relationships with the open source community. This encompasses bidirectional activities. On one hand, OSPO encourages and supports developers’ contributions to external open source projects, enabling the company to contribute to the global open source community. On the other hand, OSPO publicly releases technologies developed internally as open source to give back to the community, manages those projects, and activates collaboration with external contributors.
4. Policy Execution
OSPO’s fourth responsibility is implementing and managing established policies. OSPO systematically reviews license compliance when development teams use open source, and evaluates security vulnerabilities and intellectual property issues. Additionally, OSPO develops and operates automation tools like ONOT to streamline repetitive compliance tasks and enhance efficiency.
SK Telecom’s Open Source Decision-Making Structure
SK Telecom’s open source governance comprises a collaborative structure between OSPO (operations) and OSRB (decision-making). OSPO receives open source adoption, contribution, and release requests from development teams, conducts initial reviews, and presents them to OSRB (Open Source Review Board).
OSRB is the decision-making organization comprising leaders from technology, legal, infrastructure, and security divisions. Based on OSPO’s review results, OSRB conducts final deliberation from license, security, and intellectual property perspectives, then makes approval or rejection decisions. This two-stage review structure ensures both OSPO’s efficient operations and OSRB’s careful decision-making.
Guidance and Support Provided by OSPO
Using Open Source
When the company decides to adopt external open source, OSPO provides systematic usage guidance. The first step is license identification and review—accurately identifying the open source license and verifying alignment with corporate policy. The second step is license compatibility validation—confirming there are no compatibility issues with other licenses currently in use.
The third step is security vulnerability checking—determining whether the open source has known security vulnerabilities and, if so, whether they’ve been resolved or mitigation strategies exist. Finally, approval and documentation records the entire review process and obtains final approval, preparing for future audits or legal disputes.
View Open Source Usage Guide →
Contributing to Open Source
When developers wish to contribute to external open source projects, OSPO supports the contribution process. The first step is target project review—pre-evaluating the project’s license, community activity status, legal risks, and other factors. The second step is CLA/DCO review and signing—reviewing Contributor License Agreements or Developer Certificates of Origin that many open source projects require.
The third step is code contribution and collaboration—ensuring the developer’s code contribution complies with the project’s license and policies. Finally, license specification and documentation clarifies the contributed code’s license and verifies that the company’s intellectual property is protected.
View Open Source Contribution Guide →
Releasing Open Source
When the company decides to release internally developed technology as open source, OSPO supports the release process step-by-step. The first step is project review and pre-approval—confirming that the code to be released doesn’t contain the company’s core intellectual property and poses no security risks. The second step is license selection—SK Telecom typically selects the Apache 2.0 license to maintain a corporate-friendly yet open licensing policy.
The third step is code cleanup and documentation—removing unnecessary internal information before release and creating sufficient documentation so external developers can easily understand and use the project. Finally, public release and community management officially launches the project on GitHub, activates interaction with external contributors, and fosters a healthy open source community long-term.
View Open Source Release Guide →
Contact and Communication
Email Contact
All inquiries regarding SK Telecom OSPO and open source management can be sent to opensource@sktelecom.com. Support is available for various topics including open source usage, contribution, and release consultation, policy inquiries, and technical support.
Online Channels
SK Telecom’s open source projects can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/sktelecom. Through each project’s Issues section, you can provide feedback including bug reports, feature requests, and general questions. SK Telecom’s development team monitors and responds to these inquiries.