Moorcroft’s Joint Managing Partner and Head of Technology and CEO of Orcro, Andrew Katz was awarded the ‘Community Driver’ Award at the Open Compliance Summit 2021.

The award, which is presented annually at the end of the summit, highlights and recognises the incredible community work being done in the industry, making open source compliance faster, easier and more effective, and to make sure great compliance is available for every company of any size around the world.

Andrew is one of the UK’s leading free and open-source lawyers and renowned worldwide for his specialisms in Open Hardware. In 2020, he was nominated as the Open Hardware expert for the winning team for the European Union’s flagship policy research study on Open Source software and Open Hardware. In September 2021, the European Commission published the results of the study. He also drafted the popular Solderpad Open Hardware licence, and is on the core drafting team of the CERN Open Hardware Licence.

He regularly advises companies worldwide, including global multinationals, on issues relating to open source software and software supply chain compliance. Both Moorcrofts and Orcro are partners of the Linux Foundation’s OpenChain compliance programme, and Andrew is heavily involved in the development of OpenChain’s processes and materials, including the OpenChain specification: ISO/IEC 5230:2020.

Andrew Katz, said:

“I’m delighted and honoured to have won the ‘Community Driver’ Award at the Open Compliance Summit, alongside Hiroyuki Fukuchi, Kiyoshi Owada, Haksung Jang, Oliver Fendt. This is an exciting time to be involved in the open source community and even more so the emerging and increasingly important area of open hardware”.

The Open Compliance Summit, which was organised by the Linux Foundation took place virtually on the 16 December 2021. The video to the awards being announced and a full list of the winners can be viewed on the OpenChain Project website.