5 MIN READ
The Linux Foundation | 09 December 2021
Open source fuels the world’s innovation, yet building impactful, innovative, high-quality, and secure software at scale can be challenging when meeting the growing requirements of open source communities. Over the past two decades, we have learned that ecosystem building is complex. A solution was needed to help communities manage themselves with the proper toolsets in key functional domains.
From infrastructure to legal and compliance, from code security to marketing, our experience in project governance among communities within the Linux Foundation has accumulated years of expertise and proven best practices. As a result, we have spent the year productizing the LFX Platform, a suite of tools engineered to grow and sustain and grow the communities of today and build the communities of tomorrow.
LFX: The Open Source Community Management Toolsuite for Continued Growth
The LFX Platform tools provide our members and projects with tools to support every stage of an open source project, from funding to community management to application security. LFX is built to support the needs of all community participants; maintainers, contributors, community managers, security professionals, marketers, and more.
- Open source communities need access to better tools to scale.
- Developers need to be able to make effective code contributions, scan for security vulnerabilities, and deploy.
- Community managers need to facilitate meetings, host meet-ups online or in-person, support governing boards, and decide on proper governance structures.
- Project leadership needs to be responsive, provide support, engage in training, and promote their latest developments.
We aim to help reduce the complexity of building and managing open source ecosystems by delivering a new platform that brings people, information, tools, and supporting programs together.
We want to invite you to explore LFX. First, create your LFID needed to login. Then jump into experiencing LFX elements such as your Individual Dashboard, Mentorship, EasyCLA, Insights, or Security. The LFX platform provides open source communities the following areas of key functionality:
LFX Platform: New Features and Capabilities
Global Trends and Compare Projects capabilities extend LFX insights with new reports and enable community members to easily answer common questions about their open source ecosystem or quickly compare open source communities to identify and drive best practices.
Security Vulnerabilities and Code Secrets Scanning, with Remediation powered by Snyk and BluBracket, is now available in LFX Security. Enabling communities to automatically scan code and detect potential vulnerabilities or exposed code secrets then recommend fixes to remediate the identified issues.
Non-Inclusive Language Detection is now a part of LFX Security through integration with BluBracket, enabling the identification and elimination of non-inclusive language to attract and retain more participants and deliver on the power and promise of more diverse and inclusive open source communities.
Tool Highlight: LFX Security
The world’s most critical infrastructure is built on open source, and therefore the security of open source software is essential. LFX Security builds on the Core Infrastructure Initiative and the Open Source Security Foundation and years of learned security best practices to provide communities with the capabilities required to secure their code continuously. LFX Security is powered by integrations with leading security vendors and supports existing tools and languages.
- Automatic vulnerability scanning, with recommended fixes and inline remediation
- Risk analysis with intuitive and informative scoring
- Automatic detection of potential code secrets
- Identification of non-inclusive language in code
Learn more about LFX Security at lfx.dev/tools/security
Tool Highlight: LFX Insights
Successful open source communities require effective management of everything from code quality and build to collaboration and marketing. But to manage them effectively, data has to be gathered across disparate repositories, tools, and activities. LFX Insights integrates data from source code repositories to issue trackers, social media platforms to mailing lists and contextualizes projects, project groups, or the entire Linux Foundation ecosystem.
Learn more about LFX Insights at lfx.dev/tools/insights
The LFX platform is designed to address these issues and more. LFX aggregates dozens of data sources and commonly used management. It provides visualization tools with an added layer of intelligence to reveal best practices for numerous open source stakeholders, including developers, project leaders, open source program offices, legal, operations, and even marketing.
LFX is a suite of elements engineered to grow and sustain and grow the communities of today and build the communities of tomorrow. By automating and consolidating many of the most critical activities needed by open source projects and stakeholders, we hope to reduce complexities that sometimes hinder innovation and progress.
The LFX platform provides our members and project with tools to support every stage of an open source project. As we head into 2022, we plan to release even more functionality to support our growing community.
Create your LFID and Explore LFX at lfx.linuxfoundation.org