OSI Board Blog

For the first ten years of my open source life, I spent tens of thousands of hours pouring over hundreds of thousands of lines of source code across perhaps a dozen or fewer projects, mostly GCC, G++, GDB, and various other parts of the GNU toolchain. If there were a PhD in open source software, I was definitely specialist enough to have earned one. I was vaguely aware of the mountains of source code in the BSD distribution, and obviously Linux, but didn't really pay much attention to that until I joined Red Hat.

For the ten plus years after that, I have barely succeeded in scratching the surface of the 10,000+ packages that can be easily installed without the need to study the source code. It is both a luxury to have available the resources that are represented by the 200+ million lines of source code packaged for a typical Linux distribution, but it is also overwhelming...how can one possibly know all there is to know? And yet, I find that when I need to look for something, it's there. When I needed to control and monitor some PTZ network cameras, I looked for an open source solution and discovered a really wonderful package called Zoneminder.

In a special board meeting convened for board elections on March 16 2011, the OSI board elected three new illustrious members of the open source community - Jim Jagielski, Karl Fogel and Mike Godwin. As Simon Phipps posted in his Board Meeting report, the OSI board voted to expand the board from 10 to 11 members to enable all three members to join. Two board members were re-elected to serve a second term - Mr. Harshad Gune and Dr. Martin Michlmayr. For more details, see here.

Many people have asked if it's possible to donate to OSI to support our mission and activities. The answer is "yes" - just click this button to make a donation via PayPal - thanks! There are other alternatives on our donations page.

A change of leadership at the Free Software Foundation provides the OSI Board an opportunity to thank the outgoing Executive Director for his work promoting software freedom and to welcome the incoming executive director.

According to filings made by Novell

[On] February 2, 2011, each of [CPTN Holdings] and Novell received a Second Request from the DOJ regarding the sale of certain identified patents and patent applications to CPTN contemplated by the Patent Purchase Agreement. The Second Requests have the effect of extending the waiting period under the HSR Act until 30 days after both parties have substantially complied with the Second Requests, unless the waiting period is earlier terminated. Novell is in the process of gathering information to respond to this Second Request and is continuing to cooperate fully with the DOJ in connection with its review.

The Open Source Initiative commends the US Department of Justice for taking this important step to promote innovation by issuing a second request and deepening the investigation of CPTN's acquisition of Novell's patents. As we have stated, the history is clear: patents have been—and are likely to be—used by CPTN and its members to create fear, uncertainty and doubt concerning open source software, raise competitors costs and threaten customers. We trust and hope that following a thorough investigation, the DoJ will impose whatever measures are necessary to ensure that CPTN does not harm the commercial open source development model or market competition.