Talend Trade Agreements Act Ruling: A Major Step Forward On FOSS For US Government

Talend, a licensor of open source enterprise software, has recently received a ruling from the U.S. Customs Service corroborating that its software complies with the Trade Agreements Act 0f 1979 (19 USC 2511 et seq.) (“TAA”). Open source software adoption by the US Federal government must comply with many regulations, some of which can be difficult given the nature of modern software development. And these rules are frequently used as a barrier, or a bar, to the use of FOSS in federal government procurement. One of these issues is the ability of the FOSS company to certify compliance with the TAA which requires a product to be manufactured or “substantially transformed” in the United States or a “designated country”. A “designated country” is one of a handful of countries with which the U.S. has a trade agreement on government procurement or a similar arrangement.

However FOSS frequently contains routines or other components whose origin is not sufficiently certain to “certify” compliance with these requirements, or if certain, the origin is a non-designated country such as India or China (as a matter of transparency, my partner, Fern Lavallee, represented Talend in the approval process).