OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Sunday, July 27, 2008
OSI Face to Face Meeting at OSCON 2008
Dates: July 26-27, 2008
Venue: Park Room, Westin Portland
Day Two, July 27, 2008
Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 9:00am PST.
Attendees:
- Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
- Ms. Danese Cooper, Secretary / Treasurer
- Mr. Russ Nelson, Director
- Mr. Ken Coar, Director
- Mr. Bruno Souza, Director
- Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director
- Ms. Alolita Sharma, Director
- Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Director
- Mr. Martin Michlmayr, Director
- Mr. Harshad Gune, Director
Guests/Observers:
- Mr. Zak Greant, Board Observer (joined at 10am)
- Mr. Andrew C. Oliver, Board Observer
- Mr. Karl Fogel, Charter Member
- Mr. Jim Blandy, Charter Member
- Mr. Jos Boumans, Guest, Perl community member
Expected, but Not Present:
None.
Sent Regrets:
- Mr. Ernest Prabhakar, Board Observer
- Mr. Bdale Garbee, Board Observer
- Mr. Merrill Freund (Schwartz Communications)
- Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel
Agenda:
8:00am-9:00am
Breakfast
9:00am-10:00am
License Approval Issues
Mr. Nelson gave a state-of-the-union on licensing and issues OSI is facing. Some companies are publicly complaining about the OSI approving too many licenses and industry costs to keep up with evaluation of so many licenses. Mr. Nelson has proposed that there be two tiers of licenses e.g. a “Gold” and a “Silver” license approval where Gold == Use Encouraged, Silver == complies with the OSD but use not encouraged.
Mr. Tiemann mentioned that the community has raised several issues such as OSI not managing license proliferation. Mr. Tiemann proposed that since previous attempts of re-do the licensing process (as being currently suggested by Mr. Nelson) by OSI was partially successful. In order to avoid proliferation, we should look at license jurisdictions and preference could be given to licenses that address “future wonderfulness”.
Mr. Ghosh presented details on the EUPL (EU Public License) and that OSI and open source developer community approvals did not affect usage of the EUPL by various European government projects in the coming year.
Mr. Tiemann mentioned that trademarks for different tiers of license badges would have to be worked out clearly so that they can be approved by USPTO.
Mr. Nelson moves that we form a license proliferation committee to evaluate all existing licenses into two tiers – an upper tier and a lower tier of licenses (e.g. “recommended” and “compliant”). The role of this committee would be to establish criteria for assigning the tier for each license, use a new license-proliferation mailing list for discussion and come up with a final list of two tiers of licenses. Mr. Nelson will be chairing this new committee. The Board will select the two terms that are used. The deadline for presenting the draft recommendations from the committee back to the board will be October 2008. Ms. Cooper calls the vote, Mr. Tiemann seconds and the motion is passed unanimously.
10:15-11:15am
Affiliate Program
Ms. Cooper presented the first draft of the OSI Affiliate program. An annual summit, a sponsors advisory board, paid consulting time would be new to the OSI’s current activities. A day summit would be tacked on to an existing conference depending on location. Several suggestions to current draft were made for affiliate categories and added to the draft by Ms. Cooper.
Fundraising
Mr. Tiemann will review the affiliate program draft and finalize fundraising level information.
Sponsors Advisory Board
OSI Online Store (selling T-shirts and more)
Mr. Coar offered to store the OSI t-shirts and to set up our online storefront. Ms. Cooper will be sending the shirts to Mr. Coar.
Next Face to Face meeting suggestions
Possible venues were discussed (FOSDEM 2009 to be held February 23-24 in Brussels; GNUnify Feb’09 in India). It was decided that the next Face to Face meeting will be at FOSDEM and we will sponsor partial attendance at GNUnify Feb ’09.
11:15am-12:30pm
ED discussion session led by Mr. Tiemann.
12:30-1:00pm
Lunch (served in the room)
1:00-2:00pm
Website Cleanup
Mr. Tiemann moved that we accept Karl Fogel’s offer to assist Mr. Greant as a Drupal administrator for the OSI. Ms. Nwakanma seconded. Passed by general consent.
Mr. Tiemann calls to adjourn meeting at 1:55pm.