OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Quorum reached and meeting called to order 08:05 am PST.

Attendees

  1. Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
  2. Ms. Danese Cooper, Secretary and Treasurer
  3. Mr. Ken Coar, Director
  4. Mr. Martin Michlmayr, Director
  5. Mr. Russell Nelson, Director
  6. Mr. Bruno Souza, Director
  7. Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Director (by IRC)
  8. Ms. Alolita Sharma, Director (by IRC)
  9. Mr. Harshad Gune, Director (by IRC)

Guests/observers

  1. Mr. Zak Greant, Board Observer
  2. Mr. Andrew C. Oliver, Board Observer
  3. Mr. Bdale Garbee, Board Observer
  4. Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel
  5. Mr. Ernest Prabhakar, Board Observer

Expected, but Not Present

  1. Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director
  2. Mr. Karl Fogel, Invited Guest
  3. Mr. Merrill Freund (Schwartz Communications)

Sent regrets
None.

Agenda

  1. Approval of minutes
  2. Officer reports
  3. Committee reports
  4. Old business
  5. New business
  1. Approval of Minutes

    Ms. Cooper moves that we vote to approve March 4, 2009 minutes as edited for public posting. Mr. Tiemann seconds. Passed unanimously.

  2. Officer Reports
    President’s Report:

    Software patents have reasserted themselves as a key policy question for the OSI and again as a potentially significant threat to open source software. Lots of discussions are taking place in many corners of the business community and blogosphere about how to interpret and how the OSI should respond to software patent litigation and licensing actions. The board discussed, and will continue to discuss how the OSI should engage organizations who, on the one hand, demand to be considered members of the open source community while, on the other hand, take positive action to disrupt the very concept of open source with their legal positions and behavior.

    Thanks to Alolita Sharma, the OSI has nearly caught up with its large administrative backlog, posting all of the minutes from last year’s meeting and getting a start at posting the minutes from this year’s meetings. Thanks, Alolita!

    The approval of the EUPL has been well-received. License proliferation notwithstanding, not every new license we approve is a step backward! On the less happy side, the license approval list was subject to some fairly significant troll behavior last month, some of it supplied by the OSI. As a result, we did not focus as much attention on more polite parties seeking our input/approval. I think we should be more confident in telling people “come back when you have a community of support”. Clearly the EUPL was an example of a license that did have a strong community of support–the European Community.

    General Counsel Report: Update of editing Fedora Trademark Guidelines into OSI Trademark Guidelines will be completed this week. TomTom Lawsuit update and discussion of implications of requirement to remove FAT/LNR code. Mr. Oliver mentioned a strategy to migrate all FAT to a new standard.

    Secretary’s Report: Ms. Cooper nominated Ms. Sharma for the office of Secretary in the coming year, in deference to her excellent secretarial support in the past few months. Initial filing of documents to support non-profit status completed and Secretary of State has requested additional documentation. Deadline for final filing is April 20th.

    FOSDEM Face to Face meeting minutes: Editing of notes will be completed by end of week.

    Treasurer’s Report: Ms. Cooper reports that we have received pledge of renewal funding. Ms. Cooper notes that without additional funding we will be asking Board members to find their own funding for travel.

  3. Committee Reports
    Licensing Committee
    Licenses to be considered by Board for approval/disapproval include:
    Title: IPA Font License v1.0
    Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:515:200902:ahjoeececbbcpiajppfi
    License: http://ipafont.ipa.go.jp/enduserlicensedraft090305.htm
    Drafts:
    http://ipafont.ipa.go.jp/enduserlicensedraft090305.pdf
    http://ipafont.ipa.go.jp/enduser_license_draft090203.html
    Comments: Chuck, Bruce Perens, and Michael Tiemann are all agreed that the license is OSD-compliant.
    Recommend: Approval

    Title: SIL Open Font License 1.1
    Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:385:200811:hjdgjhelbanenkidpeml
    License: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
    Comments: Bruce Perens doesn’t think it will be successful, but we’ve never used likelihood of achieving the author’s goals as a criteria for license approval. Matt Flaschen believes it complies with the OSD. The chief concern is that you can’t sell the fonts as fonts — you can only redistribute them as data included with a program. Seems like a restriction, but that’s what we’ve had on the Bitstream fonts for three or four years now and nobody seems to complain about them.
    Recommend: Approval

    Title: Transitive Grace Period Public Licence, v1.0 (TGPPL)
    Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:462:200812:ofpndmgcgmbhbmimpkpe
    License: In the submission
    Comments: Discussion has died down, but it’s still not clear that the license will not have negative pernicious effects. The OSI should ask Zooko to come back to us when he can show us the salacious effects he predicts the license will convey. Recommend: Deferral for at least a year

    Title: caGrid Open Source License
    Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:476:200901:nhlgbahaekpcbnldleop
    License: http://cagrid.org/wiki/CaGrid:LICENSE-1.2
    Comments: Still no discussion
    Recommend: Deferral

    Mr. Tiemann calls the vote on Mr. Nelson’s report as written. Passed unanimously. Mr. Tiemann requests that Mr. Nelson update the license list immediately. Mr. Tiemann will also blog about why font licenses are different. Ms. Cooper reported on conversation she had with Mr. Tom Igoe, co-inventor of Arduino about Open Hardware licensing (at request of Mr. Tim O’Reilly).

    Membership Committee
    Deferred to next meeting.

  4. Old Business

    • Trademark status and next steps (Mr. Tiemann)
      The OSI has received a registered trademark from the US PTO for the keyhole with “Open Source Initiative”. Now the board needs to find the artwork that goes along with it! We have artwork for the keyhole with “Open Source” but it lacks the word “Initiative”. Who has the fonts? Ken Coar has the fonts along with the original artwork in several formats.
    • Guidelines for OSI affiliates to use OSI logo to promote open source events (Mr. Tiemann)
      Mr. Tiemann is awaiting final logo usage guidelines from OSI General Counsel. We need to also discuss how this can be extended to Second Life and whether it is appropriate.
    • OSI’s Education project status (Ms. Sharma)
      Ms. Sharma reports that she has been spending the last month in Asia talking with universities in India, Singapore, Malaysia, and South Korea that have already implemented or are interested in incorporating open source in their engineering curricula. Also, Ms. Sharma has been introducing OSI’s education initiative, lobbying universities to participate in the OSI’s discussions on existing curricula, interacting with teachers as well as leveraging content from the open source projects that invest heavily to develop high quality training materials.
      Another project that Ms. Sharma has been working on is to set up an open source lab in India for qualified undergrad and grad students to contribute to some of the global open source projects such as Firefox, Drupal, Fedora.
    • OSI website maintenance status (Ms. Sharma)
      Ms. Sharma reports that she has been website “gardening” – removing and updating links on opensource.org to keep the site’s content up-to-date. Robin Monks updated the OpenSource.org Drupal instance on or near March 25th. (Details on updates can be found at http://opensource.org/admin/logs/updates)

  5. New Business

    • Board nominations and elections (Ms. Cooper)

      1. New Board Membership:
        We have one Board seat up for consideration in this election (seat vacated by Mr. Bruno Souza). Running for this seat we have a single candidate, Mr. Andrew Oliver, (currently a Board Observer). Mr. Tiemann moves that we elect Mr. Andrew C. Oliver to a one-year initial term as Director on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative. Ms. Sharma seconds. Passed by majority vote.
      2. Amendment to the By-Laws:
        Ms. Cooper moved that we vote to amend the by-laws to state that all board members serving their initial term will be elected to a one-year term. After one year of service, such board member will be eligible to stand for a subsequent two-year term. After three years of service, all board members will be eligible to stand for three-year consequtive terms. Mr. Tiemann seconds. Passed by Majority Vote.
      3. Formal Election for Two-Year Terms:
        We have two Board members up for formal election to two-year terms to the Board after successfully completing their first term of service: Mr. Martin Michlmayr, Director and Mr. Harshad Gune, Director. Mr. Tiemann moves that we vote to re-elect both candidates. Ms. Cooper seconds. Passed by majority.
      4. Emeritus Members:
        Ms. Cooper moves that we vote to confer Emeritus status on Mr. Bruno Souza, in deference to his terms of service. Mr. Tiemann seconds. Passed by majority.
      5. Board Observers:
        Appointment deferred to next meeting.
      6. Board Officers:
        Mr. Tiemann is standing again for the office of President (unopposed), Danese Cooper is standing again for the office of Treasurer (unopposed), Ms. Sharma is standing for the office of Secretary for an initial term. Mr. Tiemann moves that we elect the slate. Ms. Cooper seconds. Passed by majority.
  6. Memorandum of Understanding between the Korea Software Copyright Committee of the Republic of Korea and OSI (Ms. Sharma)
    For the last few months, Ms. Sharma has been working with the Korea Software Copyright Committee (SOCOP) team to help formulate their initiatives for open source licensing and education. SOCOP is very interested in working with the OSI to facilitate exchange of experts for sharing knowledge about open source licensing, software adoption and outreach to the Korean entrepreneur community. To that end, Ms. Sharma has coordinated with the SOCOP team to draft a memorandum of understanding (MOU) which allows the two organizations to work together in growing the adoption of open source software in South Korea.
    Please review the proposed MOU document to be signed between the OSI and SOCOP in Seoul on April 17, 2009. The document can be reviewed at OSI SOCOP MOU. Ms. Sharma was initially to be in Seoul for this signing and has asked Mr. Michlmayr instead to be in Seoul for the occasion. Mr. Radcliffe has reviewed the document and sees no binding legal obligations therein and states that the document doesn’t create exclusive relationships.
  7. OSI Affiliate program details and official launch announcement (Ms. Cooper)
    – Deferred to next meeting.
  8. Mission of OSI wrt advocacy vs. antagonism (Discussion)
    – Deferred to next meeting.
  9. Microsoft Strategy (Mr. Oliver)
    – Deferred to next meeting.
  10. Open Source Business Conference 2009 – “Open Core” and other messaging (Mr. Oliver)
    – Deferred to next meeting.
  11. FISL 09 June 24-27 (Mr. Souza)
    The OSI can send a request for funding to send an OSI Director. Mr. Tiemann suggests that we discuss and decide via email.

Meeting Adjourned 10:20 PDT.