Charter

Purpose

Open source software is load-bearing in systems that can injure or kill people — vehicles, industrial machinery, medical devices, aircraft ground systems, autonomous equipment. The software was not written with those systems in mind, and the evidence needed to justify its use in them does not exist in any shared form.

The Open Source Safety Consortium exists to produce that evidence once, in the open, and maintain it as the underlying projects change.

Scope

The consortium works on three things:

• Assurance artifacts. Hazard analyses, failure mode catalogues, test evidence, and safety arguments for specific open source components at specific versions, in a common documented form.
• Practice. Guidance on how to qualify, integrate, monitor, and update open source components in systems subject to functional safety requirements.
• Upstream contribution. Patches, tests, tooling, and documentation returned to the projects themselves, so the safety work compounds instead of forking.

The consortium does not certify products, does not act as an assessment body, and does not issue approvals. It produces evidence that members and non-members use in their own safety cases, under their own responsibility.

Principles

1. Evidence, not assertion

Every claim the consortium publishes is traceable to an analysis, a test, or a documented review. Reputation, adoption numbers, and maturity are not evidence of safety.

2. Shared assurance artifacts

Artifacts are published under open licenses, in machine-readable form where possible, versioned against the components they describe.

3. Upstream first

Where safety work implies a change to a component, the consortium works with maintainers to land it upstream. Private forks are a failure mode, not a deliverable.

4. Honest scope

Every artifact states its assumptions, its operational envelope, and what it does not cover. An assurance claim without stated limits is worse than no claim, because it invites unexamined reuse.

5. Maintainers are participants, not subjects

Open source maintainers did not sign up to carry safety obligations. The consortium brings them resources and findings; it does not transfer liability or impose process on volunteer projects.

Membership

Membership is open to organizations that build, deploy, or maintain open source software in safety-relevant systems. Members commit to:

• contributing assurance work, not only consuming it;
• publishing artifacts they produce under the consortium's licenses;
• disclosing safety-relevant defects they discover in shared components;
• participating in technical review of others' artifacts.

Maintainers of in-scope open source projects participate without dues.

Governance

A technical steering committee drawn from member organizations sets the work programme and approves artifacts for publication. Decisions are made in public, with rationale recorded. No single member holds a veto, and no member's commercial interest determines what is published.

Full governance procedures are under development for founding member review.

Licensing

Documents and assurance artifacts are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Code, tooling, and test suites are published under Apache 2.0. Both permit commercial use in member and non-member safety cases alike.