OSI Board Blog

It was more than a month ago that I started my pilgrimage to Texas to prepare for and participate in a court case in East Texas, but it still seems like only yesterday. As Groklaw aptly reports, opposing counsel pressed not only the question of whether Red Hat and Novell infringed three patents originally issued to Xerox corporation (which later fell into the hands of a non-practicing entity), but argued before the jury that there was a fundamental conflict between property rights and open source software--a conflict they wanted the jury to resolve in their favor.

While I have been processing the events of the trial, playing and replaying lines of questioning over and over in my mind, I've barely been able to keep up with the extraordinary changes to both the competitive landscape and the competitive rules of the technology industry. Having escaped from one rabbit-hole, I appear to have fallen down another directly.

Today is Document Freedom Day. It is a day marked around the world for document liberation. It also highlights the importance of using open standards and open data formats for document interchange between everyone who has information to share - between people, schools, businesses and governments.

Progress is being made.

The OSI board elections were held earlier this month and the board voted in a new slate of directors starting April 1st, 2010. I would like to welcome our three new board members - Dr. Tony Wasserman of Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley campus, Dr. Fabio Kon of University of São Paulo, Brazil and Mr. Simon Phipps, an Open Source expert and prolific blogger.

As a new member of the Board (as of 1 April), I thought that it would be useful to explain why I wanted to join the OSI Board and what I hope to achieve during my term. As you can see from my bio (on the Board member page), I've been involved with software, both proprietary and open source, for my entire career, both in industry and in the research community.

The Open Source Initiative Board has added OSI to the list of organizations asking that the BBC not be allowed to add digital restriction measures to digital broadcasts in the United Kingdom. The BBC's request to do so is being reviewed by the UK regulator, OfCOM, and OSI is supporting the position statement from the UK's Open Rights Group and encouraging others to do likewise.

Introduction

Moore's Law, Disk Law, and Fiber Law have created an economic engine for growth, promising exponentially improving computing, storage, and networking performance for the foreseeable future. And yet according to a 2003 UNCTAD report, "there has been no Moore's Law for software," and indeed it is because of software that computer systems have become more expensive, more complex, and less reliable.

A recent blog posting at The Guardian about the US "Special 301" rules has generated deep concern around the global open source community.

You can read about it here and then decide for yourself whether to sign it as well.