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Yesterday afternoon, Red Hat, Inc. announced that James Whitehurst would be taking over for Matthew Szulik as chief executive. This is important open source news because Red Hat is by far the largest company practicing open source as its primary business. (Disclaimer: I am a Red Hat executive.) Already the press has characterized Jim as…

Most of you know me as President of the Open Source Initiative, but I am also Chair of the Fundraising Committee. Over the years we have raised monies large and small from companies large and small, public and private, and we have had great participation from individual donors as well. In fact, this year was…

Dear OSI Community, As part of our ongoing effort to improve transparency and encourage participation, the Open Source Initiative is announcing a major restructuring of our public mailing lists, effective immediately. Moving forward, OSI’s public discussions of Open Source issues will be concentrated on three major mailing lists: 1. License-Review This new, tightly-focused list is…

Hi everyone, As promised, we’ve dramatically expanded and rechartered the OSI mailing lists. In particular, we have split license review and general OSI issue discussions out from “license-discuss” list, to allow the latter to focus on maintaining the new Licensing FAQ. We continue to work on several other process and website improvements. Stay tuned! —…

Since there has been some confusion as of late, I’ve posted an updated Code of Conduct. Hopefully this (along with planned charter revisions) will improve our overall mailing list climate.

This morning the Give One Get One program went live, and after reading the terms and conditions of the program, I was ready for not one, but two laptops. Why two? You can read my ( parent . thesis ) blog to find out. (And you should, after reading this one.) I have seen some…

In my professoinal capacity, I spend most of my time talking with public and private sector executives about how they can use open source software to save millions (potentially billions) of dollars while replacing brittle and broken proprietary software with code that actually works. And I talk about how the values of the open source…

Last night I received a google alert about a new blog posting with a most misleading title. The title read “OSI Approves Microsoft’s ‘Shared Software’ Licenses”. This half-truth was paired with another half-truth: that I was President of the Portland-based Open Source Initiative. (The OSI is incorporated in California.) This morning, I received another google…

In July I was honored to be appointed Visiting Scholar at SILS, the School of Information and Library Science and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Information and Library Science community and the Open Source community share many common passions, especially the belief that sharing knowledge is important and good work. And increasingly…