Archived material

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. OSI Responds to…

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…

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…

I think most know by now that a license is insufficient to make something actually open source. The license just helps pass the sniff test. I use one other test…

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) Board meet this weekend in San Francisco for its annual face-to-face meeting (generously hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation). There were two significant topics on the…

Somehow I missed that Microsoft loves Open Source. There is a reason I missed it. When Microsoft is not threatening to sue people for using/distributing open source they are setting…

Many people have asked if it’s possible to donate to OSI to support our mission and activities. The answer is “yes” – just click this button to make a donation…

A change of leadership at the Free Software Foundation provides the OSI Board an opportunity to thank the outgoing Executive Director for his work promoting software freedom and to welcome…

Probably the greatest benefit of open source software is the liberty it creates to unleash innovation and the unexpected. By giving everyone four key liberties – to use the software for any purpose, to study it, to modify it and to pass it to others – software under OSI-approved licenses can be used in any way to create anything. The last twelve years since OSI was founded have seen an explosion of creativity both in the creation of software and in its use to make wonderful things happen.

Following up on an earlier blog posting, Indian Open Standards Policy Finalized, I read an article published in the The Hindu, one of India’s leading newspapers, about the concrete benefits…

Venkatesh Hariharan reports: After three years of continuous running battles, India’s Department of Information Technology has finalized the national policy on Open Standards. Over the last three years, we worked…

The Center for Strategic & International Studies updated their latest survey of Government Open Source Policies for 2010, and it is again an outstanding report. From the introductory note: This…