The Growing Importance of Software Bills of Materials (SBOM)

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 Christoph and Harald share anecdotes and insides from the very beginning of Open Source and SAP.

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Sathyajith Krishnan (SAP) and Pavan Nayak(SAP) talk 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 and Pavan explain the main features of CAP Operator and share an overview of the major automation steps handled by CAP Operator during the deployment of the application.

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.

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 use ORD or plan to use it in the future. As the platform is an open standard by SAP geared towards the SAP ecosystem, how do we ensure a correct adoption of ORD at SAP? And how can it be helpful for individuals outside of SAP?

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, Marc explains the basics of abapGit, and how it works. He also shares what abapGit is needed for, and how it can be used. Michael gives us some insights about SAP’s involvement in the development of abapGit and invites the listeners to explore more ABAP open source projects.

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 evolution of CRA? How will the CRA impact the consumption and contribution of Open Source Software?

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 source landscape in academia and how it differs from other parts of the OSS ecosystem.

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 Action (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz), as investing in digital commons strengthens innovation, economic competition, and democracy.

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. They also speak with Karsten about SBOMs within SAP and Deutsche Bahn and the importance of SBOMs when it comes to open source.

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 Foxhound successful and about some of the challenges that it has faced along the way. Anyone who wants to get involved in this project is welcome to visit the GitHub page to learn more.