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Page created on February 22, 2022 | Last modified on February 22, 2022

  • Cape Verde’s Big Win

    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…

  • Shout out to Zoneminder Project

    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,…

  • OSI Board Members, Officers and Committee Chairs for 2011-2012

    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…

  • OSI Board reponds to FCO Questionaire concerning CPTN Transaction

    Towards the end of March, we received a message from the German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office or FCO) advising us that the CPTN transaction had been re-notified to them. That means that the consortium seeking to acquire Novell’s patent portfolio – Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle – had once again asked for permission to proceed.…

  • It isn’t open source if it doesn’t pass “The patch test”.

    I think most know by now that a license is insufficient to make something actually open source. The license just helps pass the sniff test. I use one other test which I like to call “The Patch Test”. What is the patch test? The patch test is answering the question “if I submit a well-formed…

  • Board Meeting Report

    The Open Source Initiative (OSI) Board meet this weekend in San Francisco for its annual face-to-face meeting (generously hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation). There were two significant topics on the agenda. First, we had to review the substantial number of nominations for the two Board seats that become vacant on March 31st when Danese Cooper…

  • Microsoft Loves Open Source

    Somehow I missed that Microsoft loves Open Source. There is a reason I missed it. When Microsoft is not threatening to sue people for using/distributing open source they are setting up semi-secret consortiums to hamper the use of Open Source. Microsoft loves “embracing” open source. This “mixed IT” and (uni-directional) “interoperability” is frankly a silly…

  • Donate To OSI

    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.

  • FSF Leadership Change

    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. I got a call on Friday evening from Peter Brown, the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It’s been…

  • OSI Commends the US Department of Justice

    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…

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