OSI Board Blog

If Al Gore can win the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the findings of the scientific community to the political forefront, perhaps Richard Stallman should be next in line for his early and tireless advocacy against Software Patents. And the sooner, the better.

I submitted this to slashdot, and put it on my open source blog.

I am the son of an anchorman. I am a First Amendment guy. In a statement after Diana's death, I said the only thing worse than out-of-control photographers with no sense of conscience would be trying to restrict them. You can't restrict freedom of speech or the press, even if it is miserable.
— George Clooney quoted in TIME

Hello all you Open Source fans out there!

Some of you have quite rightly suggested enhancements to the overall services OSI offers the Open Source community. We've decided to do something about it...namely, to hire someone to help our all-volunteer Board of Directors work more effectively to get certain things done.

The job description is posted here, or you can just click the "OSI is Hiring!!" item in the navigation bar on the left of this page.

Copied from osi@opensource.org (the inbound channel to the OSI board):

On 9/28/07, Luis Ibanez wrote:

OSI Board:

As developers of Open Source software, at Kitware we are very excited to see that is more and more common for federal funding agencies to require or encourage the creation and use of open source software when they announce funding programs.

We see with concern however that funding agencies don't seem to have a defined standard on what "Open Source" means, and as a consequence they and the public not always receive what they are expecting in return for the investment of public funds.

According to an article published in Enterprise Open Source Magazine, CIOs interviewed by Forrester Research rank freedom more important than price or cost when considering open source software.

As SCO's attack against Linux collapses, with Judge Dale Kimball's ruling on the Novell copyrights making it plainer than ever that the lawsuit was fraudulent from the word go, we're now seeing recantations from two of SCO's three major journalistic stooges -- Dan Lyons and Rob Enderle. The third, Maureen O'Gara, has yet to be heard from.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein

Last week I flew to Las Vegas to talk on stage with The Gartner Group's lead open source analyst Mark Driver at their 2007 Open Source Summit. The subject of the discussion was a paper I presented last year in Kyoto at the STS Forum entitled Software Industry vs. Software Society: Who Wins in 2020?". In that paper I cited a reference that the global IT spend is USD $1T (one trillion dollars!), and of that $1T, $180B is pure write-off of failed applications, and that another $206B (my estimate) is also lost due to late, broken, or late-and-broken applications. Such a dismal result has not only plunged the software industry into crisis, but has put industries using IT at risk.

QNX is claiming that effective today, they will "open" the "source" code to its QNX embedded product.