News

OSI Affiliate Member, California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO) is reporting significant developments to advance the use of Open Source Software within electronic voting systems.

According to CAVO, the PAVE Act, tendered by United States’ senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Kamala Harris of California, includes provisions to address financial barriers that could be incurred by state and local governments evaluating open source options for their elections systems.

In May, the License-Review mailing list saw extensive debate on the Cryptographic Autonomy License. The list also discussed a BSD variant used by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Master-Console license.

The Open Source Initiative ® (OSI), the global organization working to promote and protect open source, is excited to announce the Affiliate Membership of the Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT). Founded in 2001, SLAT is Taiwan’s first legal entity dedicated to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), supporting both the development and user communities. As an active community of advocates and technologists, SLAT both drives initiatives, and partners with existing projects, to promote FOSS, including the Open Source Software Application Consulting Center—a program fostering FOSS in Taiwan's schools.

Welcome to the Open Source Initiative’s 2018 annual report. In this year's report you’ll learn about the organization’s activities from the past year, which captures the hard work of employees, contractors, volunteers, and those passionate about open source. I hope this will give you some context on why this work happened and what makes it so important. The Open Source Initiative was started in 1998 by a group of people interested in seeing ethics applied to the creation and distribution of software. This approach was built on a foundation of ideals – a specific philosophy on the rights and responsibilities of software users and creators. More than twenty years later, I am writing as a director of the OSI, which has grown into a robust organization with record numbers of individual and affiliate members, a dedicated all volunteer board, and the incredible support of volunteers and open source enthusiasts around the world.