Governance
Governance and name
Open Brand Exchange should belong to the brands, retailers and software vendors who use it, not to one company.
Who is behind it
The Open Brand Exchange Foundation (in formation) is being set up as a Dutch foundation (stichting). Once it exists, the copyright, the name, the domain and the GitHub organisation will be transferred to it. Imprint.
Who decides
Until there are three independent implementations that pass the conformance suite, the founder decides on changes, after public discussion. After that, a steering group takes over, with one seat per implementer and at least one brand and one retailer.
How changes are made
Every change to the standard is a public pull request with a short reason. Larger proposals stay open for comments for at least 14 days. Anyone can contribute, without signing a contributor agreement.
Neutral by design
Nothing in the standard may require a particular vendor or hosted service. Anyone may implement it, host it for others or build a competing product on it. No implementation gets special treatment in the conformance suite, including that of Photopilot, the initiator's company.
Licences
The specification and the content of this site are CC-BY-4.0. The SDK, the obx tool and the shared web interface are Apache-2.0. The three portal editions are AGPL-3.0, so improvements to them stay open. The code of this site is MIT.
About the name
The name "Open Brand Exchange" is the same in every language and is never translated. It is not a registered trademark yet. Software that passes the conformance suite may say it "works with Open Brand Exchange".