A lot goes into making open source great – from licenses to code to community. A key part of doing open source right is being able to trust that the code you receive complies with its open source licenses. It’s a deceptively hard problem and one that Microsoft is working with the community to address.
The OpenChain Project plays an important role in increasing confidence around the open source code you receive. It does so by creating standards and training materials focused on how to run a quality open source compliance program, which in turn builds trust and removes friction in the ecosystem and supply chain.
We’ve had the honor of working with the OpenChain community to help develop its forthcoming specification version, and today we’re pleased to announce that we are joining OpenChain both as a platinum member and as a board member.
Our goal is to work even more closely with the OpenChain community to create the standards that will bring even greater trust to the open source ecosystem and that will work for everyone – from individual developers to the largest enterprises.
And Microsoft’s efforts to work with the community to improve open source compliance don’t stop with OpenChain. We’re actively working with ClearlyDefined, which brings clarity to open source component license terms and enables better compliance automation, and the Linux Foundation’s TODO Group, where members develop and share best practices for running world-class open source programs.
We look forward to continued collaboration with OpenChain and the broader open source community to bring greater confidence, clarity, and efficiency to the open source ecosystem.
Conductor is an open-source CLI (MIT license, Microsoft org) that takes a different approach: you define your multi-agent workflows in YAML, and the routing between agents is deterministic. Jinja2 templates and expression evaluation handle conditions and branching. The orchestration layer consumes zero tokens. The structure is fixed at definition time—and that's the point.
From improving reliability and performance to advancing security and AI-native workloads, our goal remains the same: make Kubernetes better for everyone.