Josh Berkus has been involved with open source for 25 years, including participating in Linux, PostgreSQL, Perl, OpenOffice, Django, MySQL, CouchDB, Docker, Kubernetes, and multiple other communities. He is currently an Individual Board Member of the OSI, and has been on the board for one term. He chairs the License Consistency Working Group. He has also been a contributing member of License Review since 2003, regularly contributing a developer perspective to reviews of submitted licenses.
Josh works for the Red Hat Open Source Program Office, where he supports and administers multiple open source projects and interfaces with many OSS-supporting companies and foundations, including guiding teams and partners in launching open source efforts.
Additionally, Josh has accumulated a significant amount of nonprofit experience. He has been a fundraiser for the San Francisco Opera, during which time he was a member of Development Executives Rountable and other professional fundraising organizations. He is the co-chair of the Contributor Strategy TAG in the Cloud Native Computing foundation, and has a history of collaboration with the Linux Foundation and the Open Infra Foundation. Josh is also a former board member and treasurer of Software In The Public Interest, where he helped with the final transfer of ownership of the Opensource.org domain to the OSI.
Josh sits on the program committee for several software conferences, is a well-known public speaker at many tech events, and wants to know “why is it always database companies messing with licenses?”
How will you contribute to the board:
I plan to complete my work on the License Consistency Working Group, and significantly rationalize our license list. This work is coordinated with the other working group in seeing that licenses are marked in ways that make them clear to adopters.
I will continue my efforts to improve the election rules and processes for the OSI in order to prevent issues and increase election participation.
I also plan to continue collaborate with staff in the following areas as OSI’s staffing grows and the staff are able to take on new initiatives:
- Improving membership participation, recruitment, and fundraising
- Launching an Ambassador program
- Working on new license review tools
- Building awareness of the OSI, its mission and programs
Why you should be elected:
My main goal as a board member is to help the OSI improve continuously as a non-profit organization. In order for OSI to promote real open source, develop new standards for open source AI, educate developers and lawyers, and advocate for open source projects and contributors in legislatures and with regulatory bodies, it needs to have a stable and growing foundation. OSI needs a high profile and it needs to be trusted and respected, not just by its members, but by world leaders. Maintaining OSI’s status and effectiveness requires continuous work, and as a board member I will be there to help the staff do that work.