News

2018 Open Source Initiative Annual Report

Submitted by Molly de Blanc on Fri, 2019-05-24 12:03

2018 Annual Report 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.

Open Source Hong Kong Becomes an OSI Affiliate Member

Submitted by administrator on Wed, 2019-05-22 09:25

PALO ALTO, Calif. - May 14, 2019 ​ - The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the founding organization of the open source software movement, is excited to announce the Affiliate Membership of the Open Source Hong Kong (OSHK). For ten years OSHK has worked across Asia to support open source communities, foster open source development, and increase the use of open source software, their recent OSI Membership highlights both organizations' desires to collaborate across communities.

OSI Board Evolution

Submitted by webmink on Tue, 2019-05-14 07:42

OSI Board 2019-20

I spent last week in New York at the annual new-inductees face-to-face Board meeting of the Open Source Initiative Board (pictured here – Christine Hall is also a member but was unable to join us). Having spent the last 11 years working on refactoring OSI for a new generation, I had advised the Board in advance that I intended to step down as President to make way for fresh blood. The Board elected Molly de Blanc as the new President and Josh Simmons as Vice President, with Hong Phuc Dang bravely volunteering to be CFO. I agreed to serve as Board Secretary until someone else feels ready to play that role – no later than next April when my term ends.

Powering Potential Expands to Peru

Submitted by administrator on Tue, 2019-04-09 13:18

The Open Source Initiative’s first African Affiliate, Powering Potential Inc. (PPI), is pleased to announce a pilot program expansion in Peru of their award-winning solar-powered Raspberry Pi computer labs already enhancing education throughout rural Tanzania, Africa. PPI’s pilot project is placing a computing lab at the San Francisco Rio Itaya School, located in the Amazon region of Iquitos, Peru.

ClearlyDefined Update

Submitted by csmith on Tue, 2019-04-02 06:13

It’s been just over a year since the Open Source Initiative approved the proposal for ClearlyDefined to be a project under its organization. So far the project has successfully built a robust software system in collaboration with lots of folks from the community. We wanted to tell you more about what we’ve built so far and how you can get involved with the project.

March 2019 License-Review Summary

Submitted by LAtkinson on Mon, 2019-04-01 04:46

In March, the License-Review mailing list saw the retraction of the SSPL from review, and discussed a set of GPLv3 Additional Terms.

The License-Discuss list (summarized at https://opensource.org/LicenseDiscuss032019) was far more active. Among other things, it discussed Van Lindberg's upcoming Cryptographic Autonomy License, and saw extensive discussion about the license review process: whether the conduct of the list is appropriate, whether there might be alternatives to using email, and whether PEP-style summaries would help.

Pages

Subscribe to News

To promote and protect open source software and communities...

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.