Open Source Initiative

UPDATE: Please note this survey was completed in March 2012 and the data was used to design OSI Individual Membership

The Open Source Initiative is switching to a member-led governance. For that, it will need members.

The OSI Board would be very grateful if you would complete the totally anonymous survey which will help us understand what attributes you would like from OSI membership in the future. Thanks for your help!

New Hampshire has passed a new law that is summarized as follows:

This bill requires state agencies to consider open source software when acquiring software and promotes the use of open data formats by state agencies. This bill also directs the commissioner of information technology to develop a statewide information policy based on principles of open government data.

They are living up to the high standards of their state motto!

In preparation for my keynote at FOSDEM, I was interviewed by the team who have just posted the interview. In particular, I noted this background to the governance reform, which readers here might find useful:

As courses, certificates, and curricula are created, it's valuable to bring together people who are working to develop and deliver this material into a community where we can jointly define a central body of knowledge related to free, libre, and open source software. That goal has led me to take the first step toward creating this body of knowledge, termed FLOSSBOK. The initial outline, intentionally very brief, can be found on our FLOSS Competency Center site.

The Open Source Initiative Board joined many other civil society organizations as co-signatories of an open letter expressing concern about SOPA and PIPA.

Last week saw a quiet landmark in the history of the open source movement with the formal release of version two of the Mozilla Public License (MPLv2) and its approval as an official open source license. While to many it may look like just another legal detail, it is significant both for the way it was conducted and for the intent with which it has been created. This is a license aimed at unity.

This page preserves the news flow from the OSI home page at the start of 2011 concerning the purchase of Novell's patent portfolio by the CPTN Consortium.

Last week it was announced that former Cape Verde president Pedro Pires won the $5 million Mo Ibrahim prize for exceptional African leadership. As the citation explains, Cape Verde is among the smallest countries in Africa, poorest in natural resources, and yet managed to move its population of 500,000 forward much faster and much further than many other countries that shared similar (or presumably stronger) attributes. The key to their success? Openness.

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.