Molly de Blanc's blog

Welcome to the Open Source Initiative’s 2018 annual report. In this year's report you’ll learn about the organization’s activities from the past year, which captures the hard work of employees, contractors, volunteers, and those passionate about open source. I hope this will give you some context on why this work happened and what makes it so important. The Open Source Initiative was started in 1998 by a group of people interested in seeing ethics applied to the creation and distribution of software. This approach was built on a foundation of ideals – a specific philosophy on the rights and responsibilities of software users and creators. More than twenty years later, I am writing as a director of the OSI, which has grown into a robust organization with record numbers of individual and affiliate members, a dedicated all volunteer board, and the incredible support of volunteers and open source enthusiasts around the world.

The Open Source Initiative board is homogeneous, stratified across generations.

We fit across three (tech) generations of contributors to free and open source software–those who were involved in the early days of free software; those who found places in the community after open source had been established; and the group paultag humorously dubbed the GNU generation–none of us have lived in a world without the explicit concept of user freedom.