Certification FAQ

Certification FAQ

This page provides information on Certification, with an emphasis on matters that are partially or fully governed by the Open Compute Project Foundation.

What is the policy around tools used for Certification activities ?

The Foundation has asserted through many channels its commitment to the use of Open technologies whether they be hardware or software. This is a fundamental tenet of the Foundation's operations and principles and as such is a firmly held position 1.

Tools used for test activities are no different - they must be available under a recognised Open Source license or they are unsuitable for use as part of an OCP Foundation sanctioned Certification process.

The Foundation has no objections to Labs involved in OCP test and certification activities providing services to customers that do rely on proprietary tools.

This could, for example, include a scenario where the lab performs testing on OCP hardware using tools provided by a 3rd party to validate the servers suitability for a particular operating system or virtualisation environment. The only proviso here being that it is clear that it is not an OCP Certification activity, it is a software compatibility test and hence the OCP Certified/OCP Ready trademarks cannot be used.

1 This is spelled out in various ways through the Foundation's Bylaws, Membership Agreement and IP Management Policy. In the latter S2.1 is particularly clear. http://www.opencompute.org/assets/Uploads/OCP-PR-Policy.pdf