A Time to Start

Open Source Initiative

• OSI Reform At FOSDEM
  In preparation for my keynote at FOSDEM, I was interviewed by the team who have just posted the interview. In particular, I noted this background to the governance reform, which readers here might find useful: Why exactly did OSI decide to reorganize its governance from a board-only organization into a member-based structure?read more
• FLOSS Body of Knowledge
  As courses, certificates, and curricula are created, it's valuable to bring together people who are working to develop and deliver this material into a community where we can jointly define a central body of knowledge related to free, libre, and open source software. That goal has led me to take the first step toward creating this body of knowledge, te […]
• OSI Opposes SOPA and PIPA
  The Open Source Initiative Board joined many other civil society organizations as co-signatories of an open letter expressing concern about SOPA and PIPA. As human rights and press freedom advocates, we write to express our deep concern about S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), and the threat it poses to international human rights. Like H.R. 3261, the Stop On […]
• Mozilla Releases OSI-Approved MPLv2
  Last week saw a quiet landmark in the history of the open source movement with the formal release of version two of the Mozilla Public License (MPLv2) and its approval as an official open source license. While to many it may look like just another legal detail, it is significant both for the way it was conducted and for the intent with which it has been cr […]
• Open Source receives official support in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
  On November 11, 2011, the government of the State of Rio de Janeiro - the second largest state in Brazil in terms of population and GDP - published a new law, which mandates public entities and companies in Rio de Janeiro to give preference to open document formats, in particular ODF. The publication of Law #5978/2011 was celebrated in an official event wit […]
• OSI and the CPTN Transaction
  This page preserves the news flow from the OSI home page at the start of 2011 concerning the purchase of Novell's patent portfolio by the CPTN Consortium. read more
• Cape Verde's Big Win
  Last week it was announced that former Cape Verde president Pedro Pires won the $5 million Mo Ibrahim prize for exceptional African leadership. As the citation explains, Cape Verde is among the smallest countries in Africa, poorest in natural resources, and yet managed to move its population of 500,000 forward much faster and much further than many other co […]
• Shout out to Zoneminder Project
  For the first ten years of my open source life, I spent tens of thousands of hours pouring over hundreds of thousands of lines of source code across perhaps a dozen or fewer projects, mostly GCC, G++, GDB, and various other parts of the GNU toolchain. If there were a PhD in open source software, I was definitely specialist enough to have earned one. I was […]
• OSI Board Members, Officers and Committee Chairs for 2011-2012
  In a special board meeting convened for board elections on March 16 2011, the OSI board elected three new illustrious members of the open source community - Jim Jagielski, Karl Fogel and Mike Godwin. As Simon Phipps posted in his Board Meeting report, the OSI board voted to expand the board from 10 to 11 members to enable all three members to join. Two board […]
• OSI Board reponds to FCO Questionaire concerning CPTN Transaction
  Towards the end of March, we received a message from the German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office or FCO) advising us that the CPTN transaction had been re-notified to them. That means that the consortium seeking to acquire Novell's patent portfolio - Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle - had once again asked for permission to proceed. OSI Concerns […]