OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Meeting began 8:15am PST
Attendees:
Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director
Mr. Ken Coar, Director
Mr. Russell Nelson, Director
Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
Guests/observers:
Mr. Ernest Prabhakar
Mr. Andrew C. Oliver
Mr. Bdale Garbee
Mr. Fede Heinz
Mr. Merrill Freund (Schwartz Communications)
Absent:
Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel
Mr. Bruno Souza, Director
Apologies:
Mr. Matt Asay, Director
Mr. Raj Mathur, Director
Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Director
Ms. Alolita Sharma, Director
Ms. Danese Cooper, Secretary and Treasurer
Agenda
1. Officer reports
A. President
Mr. Tiemann’s report for this month:
“Community involvement in OSI discussions has been robust since OSCON, and there is no doubt that OSI remains relevant, if not controversial from time to time. One or two participants threaten to derail that, however, and I believe we should enforce our Terms of Service and exercise our right to exclude people who are unapologetically disruptive to the purpose of our lists.
I will be sending 2007 invoices to companies who have asked for them and not yet to those we have targeted.
With GPLv3 and Microsoft license approvals are now completed, I believe the OSI needs to return to License Proliferation and make that a top agenda priority. I believe we can do this in parallel with, and not in contradiction of, the ideas.opensource.org discussion.
I am pleased that we continue to make progress with the Minutes. Nevertheless, I would like to see more committed participation from more of the board. We do have a policy that board members who cannot attend meetings should send notice in advance of their absense, and it would be nice if those members would, when time and connectivity permit, check in with at least one board member who did attend the meeting or, failing that, at least insert comments into the Wiki.”
B. General Counsel
No report.
C. Secretary
No report
D. Treasurer
No report
2. Committee reports
A. Licensing Committee (Mr. Nelson)
1. SimPL allows promotion to GPLv2 or GPLv3. Since it doesn’t promote proliferation, we had decided that if the answer was in the affirmative, we would approve.
Mr. Tiemann notes that because the SimPL permits relicensing under GPLv2 or GPLv3, it provides a way for developers to graduate from the training wheels of the SimPL to the full-fledged GPL. Therefore it does not create a licensing dead-end and thus does not exacerbate the negative aspects of licensing proliferation.
B. Web Enhancements including Alfresco proposal and other requested Drupal enhancements (Ms. Sharma)
No report
C. Membership Project
Mr. Coar reported that the topic of OSI membership was very popular in Lima, Peru at the October 2007 VISION conference.
3. Old Business
A. Mr. Mark Webbink, former General Counsel of Red Hat, and Legal Affairs Board discussion (Mr. Tiemann)
Mr. Webbink will draft a list of names to populate the team and send it to the Board; finalisation of how the team will be comprised and empowered and overseen will be settled at the next face-to-face meeting.
B. Revisit Tee-shirt logo request (Mr. Coar)
C. Japanese Fonts Licenses (Mr. Tiemann)
D. Mail List Reorg (Mr. Prabhakar)
E. Affliates Program – recent requests (Mr. Nelson)
4. New Business
A. Discussed removal of an individual from license-discuss for violation of terms of service (Mr. Tiemann)
Meeting Adjourned at 09h10 PDT, to reconvene in IRC on Friday, 9 November 2007 at 08h00 PDT