GPA  Grid Protection Alliance

GPA is a leader in the creation of Open Source Software (OSS) for electric utilities through collaborative development projects involving electric utilities, proprietary software vendors, research organizations and academia. GPA's OSS products and software components are easy for vendors to incorporate into their proprietary product offerings. GPA's OSS also supports the academic R&D business model and can be used to create new intellectual property.

All GPA OSS is made available to users under the permissive MIT License.

Also see GPA's Security Policy, the approach to Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosures and the Definition for Security Vulnerability for its open source software.

OSS Benefits

• OSS has become an integral part of the IT infrastructure and ecosystem
• In many cases, OSS beats proprietary software on quality, security, features and total cost of ownership
• There is a very large and growing number of high-quality OSS solutions.

Incorporating OSS in New Applications Has Benefit

Many companies have a strategy to encourage incorporation of OSS components in new software and systems.

• Accelerates collaboration and promotes innovation
• Reuse of proven components increases software quality
• “Many eyes” improve the security and performance of new components
• For collaborative or out-sourced development, removes "ownership" as an issue and provides assurance that the software is freely accessible

The Value of OSS Is Multiplied Through Community Contributions

GPA encourages others to contribute software. Using the process shown to the left, GPA maintains the tested, high-quality source code repository as we grant permission to allow developers to contribute software to us. GPA also encourages others to distribute and provide support services for GPA's products.

Learn more about OSS use and value

- David A. Wheeler, Why OSS?
- MITRE Corporation -- a good reference
- DOD, Clarifying Guidance Regarding OSS, 2009
- The Open Source Initiative
- Black Duck Software openHUB to discover and compare OSS
- OpenSource.com - open source news