OSI Board Meeting Minutes, February 8, 2006

February 8, 2006

Attendees:

Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
Ms. Danese Cooper, Secretary / Treasurer
Mr. Ken Coar, Director
Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director
Mr. Joi Ito, Director
Mr. Bruno Souza, Director
Mr. Sanjiva Weewarawana, Director

Late:
Mr. Russ Nelson, Director

Absent:
Mr. Chris DiBona, Director
Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel
Ms. Laura Majerus, Director of Legal Affairs

Quorum Established at 11:25 am EDT/ 08:25 PDT

Agenda:

1. Approval of the minutes:
Minutes were approved by general consent.

2. Communication/PR:
Nothing to report.

3. Nominations for OSI Board:
OSI has received 4 responses of interest (Matt Asay of Alfresco, Ernie Prabhakar of Apple, Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems, and Joris Komen of SchoolNet Africa) and 1 NACK (Con Zymaris, Cybersource of Australia). Ms. Cooper has sent a ping today to non-respondents, as well as contacted some additional candidates based in Africa.

Backup Officers: Mr. Tiemann to write up an email.

4. 2006 F2F Venues:
Pending conferences in Croatia and Brazil cause a conflict since they are happening at the same time. Ms. Cooper proposes to send 2-3 people to each conference for evangelism purposes. OSI can have Mr. Coar and Mr. Souza attending FISL for sure and Mr. Tiemann has an 85% chance of being able to attend. Due to travel difficulties, not all BOD can be present in Brazil. Hence, we prefer to have our formal board meeting via phone either prior or post the conference(s). We don’t want to have geographically split quora because that could lead to inconsistent decisions. As for the fall, India may sponsor Mr. Nelson which would help the budget.

5. Other issues:
Mr. Radcliffe, General Counsel, would like to get comments back on his email from last night re: copyright and trademark.

6. Next meeting:
Wednesday, Mar 8th 11AM EST/ 8AM PT

7. Meeting adjournment:
Motion moved to adjourn by Mr. Tiemann at 12:52pm. Seconded by Mr. Weerawarana. Meeting adjourned at 12:54pm ET/ 9:54 PT.

Committee Reports:

1. License Committee status presented by Mr. Nelson

a) License approval: The author, Mr. Larry Rosen of Rosenlaw, wonders when will we put the OSL and AFL up on the website. Mr. Nelson to let us know what its blocking on and ideally get something resolved (for or against).

b) License proliferation (LPC): Mr. Tiemann and Mr. Eric Raymond (Founder and Director Emeritus of the OSI) attended LPC conference call last week and discussed a draft document spelling out the license tiers and assignments of licenses to tiers. That meeting wrapped up with the following action item for the OSI board to review the draft document and discuss.

c) LPC Action Item:
Mr. Raymond owes the board a proposed "Where do we go from here?" document to accompany the tiering document from the committee.

d) License Proliferation Discussion: Need to reach license stewards before releasing preliminary License Proliferation Committee findings. Mr. Nelson will also call Mr. Raymond to get "where we go from here" document to accompany report. In general the board was pleased with the work done by the License Proliferation Committee thus far.

e) Compiere License Discussion:
The Board reviewed five options proposed by Mr. Nelson’s –

  • Option 1: that Compiere use the MPL un-modified (and therefore approved)
  • Option 2: that Compiere not use the OSI Certified mark until AFTER they has submitted their re-branded and also not reusable license.
  • Option 3: that Compiere switch to an MPL-derived license which is reusable.
  • Option 4: That simply OSI accept his changes even though they go futher than a name substitution.
  • Option 5: Tell everyone that we are treating the MPL as a template license, and that certain sections may be changed without affecting the approval status. That would allow us to suggest retirement of several licenses from the approved list: Sun Public License, Ricoh Source Code Public License, and Nokia Open Source License.

Some support for treating MPL as a special case and chosing the last option, but some strong arguments as to why this goes directly against both license proliferation (more licenses) and compatibility (because of derived work licensing issues). Mr Tiemann will follow up with Compiere to discuss the OSI’s consensus that the next step lies in one of the first three alternatives (where CDDL could act as a stand-in for the templated MPL) and where alternatives two is where we started with Compiere.

2) Membership Committee:
Nothing to report.

3) Fundraising Committee:
Nothing to report.

4) Open Standards Committee:
Ongoing discussion of position before constituting committee.

Meeting adjourned at 12:54pm ET/ 9:54 PT.