The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) is responsible for providing advice and guidance to the Governing Board and FINOS team as part of the project contribution process. The FINOS team is predominantly responsible for ensuring the technical aspects of contribution are covered (e.g. legal, compliance, licencing, IP), whereas the TOC is responsible for determining whether a potential contribution is a good 'fit' for FINOS.

While deteriming fit is always going to be somewhat subjective, the TOC has agreed on the following principles, which should be used to guide discussions and inform decisions. In applying these principles, the TOC members should be considered industry experts, they speak for the FINOS community as a whole.

The principles are as follows:

The Purpose of FINOS is defined as follows:

[...] to accelerate collaboration and innovation in financial services through the adoption of open source software, standards and best practices

This is a key statement which captures the scope of the organisation. Alignment with this purpose is the first step towards building a cohesive and relevant ecosystem.

Giving members the choice between different projects that serve the same use case, or implement the same standards, is considered a good thing. An element of competition generally results in an ever-evolving and improving ecosystem of solutions. However, competing standards have the opposite effect, they result in a fractured ecosystem where competition results in exclusion.

There are various models (e.g. open-core) whereby parts of a commercial project are open-sourced, delivering genuine value to the community. These component can be used freely without the need to purchase the associated product. However, there can be instances where the open source component is not useable or valuable of itself, and the act of open sourcing is primarily being used as a sales channel. When evaluating open source components associated with commercial products, we need to ensure that they deliver value without the need to purchase the associated commercial product.

FINOS wishes to drive both adoption of, and collaboration within their portfolio of projects and standards. A key prerequisite of this is ‘general interest’. Ideally this interest should be expressed at the point of contribution, however, we may accept projects that we feel have the potential to generate interest among the members in the future.

FINOS is looking for projects that are either demonstrably delivering value in their present form, or have a clear path and commitment to get there.

Giving members the choice between different projects that serve the same use case, or implement the same standards, is considered a good thing. An element of competition generally results in an ever-evolving and improving ecosystem of solutions. However, competition can also have a negative impact whereby effort is wasted due to multiple parties addressing the same problem. While we do not mandate that competing projects are merged, this option should be considered at the point of contribution.