4. Platform Independence

Note

Indicator Requirement: "When the digital public good has mandatory dependencies that create more restrictions than the original license, proving independence from the closed component(s) and/or indicating the existence of functional, open alternatives that can be used without significant changes to the core product is required."

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For this indicator, your digital solution must disclose its mandatory dependencies or assets (i.e. libraries, software, or hardware) which may create more restrictions than the original license. Applicants must provide a description of how open-source components are independent and/or list the open alternatives for any closed component(s). Your application should be able to demonstrate that closed components can be replaced with open alternatives with minimal configuration changes and without requiring a major overhaul of the entire solution. Below are recommendations for each DPG category.

Open Software and Open AI Systems

Please read our more detailed platform independence guide for this category to learn more about why this is important, common issues potential DPGs face, frequently asked questions, and how you can provide evidence for this indicator. To summarize, a good way to indicate platform independence is to:

• Clearly reference and attribute any external assets or sources used within your software.
• Submit a dependency graph (SBOM) created automatically by your source repository. To learn how to generate this, kindly read the user guide for GitHub or GitLab.

Tip

• A Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM) tracks all components in your software's supply chain, including the versions of all the dependencies used in building the software. Submitting this along with your answer to this question (though not mandatory) will greatly increase your chances of clearing this indicator.
• Since AI models are heavily dependent on the data set used for training, please inform us whether or not periodic updates will be made to the training set, how these updates will affect the final model, and how will they be conveyed to users of the model.

Open Data

All data sets must not create mandatory dependencies on the users of the data. In case there are dependencies, users should be given an easy, no-cost way, to navigate to other open technologies with clear documentation (i.e. the dependencies must have alternatives and cannot be a mandatory part of the data set).

Open Content

All elements or assets within the content must not create more restrictions than the original license. A good way to indicate this is to clearly reference and attribute any external assets or sources used within your content. If your content collection consists of fully owned assets and IP you do not need to provide any additional evidence.

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Tip

Here's a collection of extra resources and helpful links curated by the DPGA and the DPG community you can explore or contribute to.