Chris Aniszczyk is an open source technologist with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He’s currently a CTO at the Linux Foundation focused on developer experience and running the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). At the Linux Foundation, he helped start a variety of open source foundations, from GraphQL Foundation, TODO Group to the FinOps Foundation and more!
In a previous life, he created the Twitter OSPO and led their open source efforts. For many years he served on the Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors representing the committer community and the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee. In his younger years, he bootstrapped a open source consulting company, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many eclipse.org and Linux related projects.
How will you contribute to the board
Chris has extensive experience in sustainability around open source foundations, from creation to fundraising to operation. I’d contribute that experience to help scale OSI to the next level.
Why you should be elected
I believe that we are at an inflection point in open source where partly, open source is everywhere and extremely successful. However, there are issues around what does open source mean in a new era of generative AI, intelligent cloud development environments and supply chain security, the OSI should be at the forefront of defining and protecting open source in these fields.
Furthermore, a simple realistic goal would be to expand OSI’s fundraising to help further professionalize the organization so it can be sustained into the next decade.
Finally, selfishly, I simply would like to pay it forward, I have benefited from OSI’s stewardship of open source licensing in my career and I’d like to ensure that OSI lasts into the next decade of open source.
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Questions for the candidates received from Luis Villa:
Your time: You have 24 hours in the day and could do many different things. Why do you want to give some of those hours to OSI? What do you expect your focus to be during those hours?
Licensing process: The organization has proposed improvements to the license-review process. What do you think of them?
Broader knowledge: What should OSI do about the tens of millions of people who regularly collaborate to build software online (often calling that activity, colloquially, open source) but don’t know what OSI is or what it does?
Regulation: New industry regulation in both the EU and US suggests government will be more involved in open source in the future. What role do you think OSI should play in these discussions? How would you, as a board member, impact that?
Solo maintainers: The median number of developers on open source projects is one, and regulation and industry standards are increasing their burden. How (if at all) should OSI address that? Is there tension between that and industry needs?
OSI initiative on AI: What did you think of the recent OSI initiative on AI? If you liked it, what topics would you suggest for similar treatment in the future? If you didn’t like it, what would you improve, or do instead?
Responsible licensing: There are now multiple initiatives around “responsible” or “ethical” licensing, particularly (but not limited to) around machine learning. What should OSI’s relationship to these movements and organizations be?