From the Board

Board Meeting Report

Submitted by webmink on Wed, 2011-03-16 17:35
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 and Russ Nelson leave the Board due to term limits after a decade each of service.

Happy Birthday Wikipedia!

Submitted by webmink on Mon, 2011-01-17 04:54
Probably the greatest benefit of open source software is the liberty it creates to unleash innovation and the unexpected. By giving everyone four key liberties - to use the software for any purpose, to study it, to modify it and to pass it to others - software under OSI-approved licenses can be used in any way to create anything. The last twelve years since OSI was founded have seen an explosion of creativity both in the creation of software and in its use to make wonderful things happen.

The Concrete Benefits of Open Source Software

Submitted by Michael Tiemann on Mon, 2010-12-06 11:53

Following up on an earlier blog posting, Indian Open Standards Policy Finalized, I read an article published in the The Hindu, one of India's leading newspapers, about the concrete benefits of this policy. It also provides a very meaningful template for open source advocates to see how well an argument can be made with the proper framing of facts. Here is a quote from the third paragraph:

SCOSTA [the Smart Card Operating System for Transport Applications] was a standard developed for smart card-based driving licences and transport-related documentation by different State governments. It was developed by the National Informatics Centre in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Despite attempts by proprietary lobbies to make the body opt for a proprietary standard, the NIC and academics went ahead and developed an open standards, one that comprised technological specifications that were entirely royalty-free, and put up the specifications on their website. By doing so, they made a huge impact on the entire market.

Indian Open Standards Policy Finalized

Submitted by Michael Tiemann on Fri, 2010-11-12 07:10

Venkatesh Hariharan reports:

After three years of continuous running battles, India's Department of Information Technology has finalized the national policy on Open Standards. Over the last three years, we worked with our friends in government, academic, civil society and the media to push the Indian government in favor of a policy that mandates a single, royalty-free standard. With this, India becomes another major country to join the growing open standards movement.

India's e-governance standards portal is at http://egovstandards.gov.in/ and this is the link from which you can directly read the policy document.

Of particular interest is Clause 4.1.2:

The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long...

Submitted by Michael Tiemann on Tue, 2010-09-14 11:32
Nearly six years ago Google launched a new project to promote and support open source software development: Google Code. Back in those days we had Intel Pentium 4 processors that ran at 533 MHz (or 800 Mhz if we were lucky), and contained 125M transistors using a 90nm process. Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle, working for SAP Research, uncovered evidence that in 2004 there were approximately 125M source lines of code (SLOC) of open source software in the world. Fedora Core 3 had 1652 packages, and SE Linux policies protected only 13 of them (apache , dhcpd, mailman, mysqld, named , ntpd, pegasus, portmap, postgresql, snmpd, squid, syslogd, winbind). Six years is a long time ago! At that time, Google Code did not treat all OSI-approved licenses equally. Some were definitely more equal that others. But a lot can happen in six years...

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For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.