OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 08:07 am PT.

Attendees

Board Members

  1. Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
  2. Mr. Ken Coar, Director
  3. Ms. Danese Cooper, Treasurer
  4. Mr. Harshad Gune, Director
  5. Mr. Martin Michlmayr, Director
  6. Mr. Russell Nelson, Director
  7. Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Director (left call at 09:15 am PT)
  8. Ms. Alolita Sharma, Secretary

Guests and Observers

  1. Mr. Bdale Garbee, Board Observer (on IRC)
  2. Mr. Simon Phipps, Board Observer (joined call at 9:00 am PT)

Expected, but Not Present

  1. Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director
  2. Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel
  3. Mr. Merrill Freund (Schwartz Communications)

Sent Regrets

  1. Mr. Andrew Oliver, Director
  2. Mr. Ernest Prabhakar, Board Observer

Agenda

  1. Minutes Review and Approval
  2. Officer Reports
  3. Committee Reports
  4. Old Business
  5. New Business
  6. Motions for Consideration by Board
  7. Next Board Meeting

Minutes Review and Approval

Please review the following minutes as edited for public posting.

November 11, 2009 – Monthly board meeting

Mr. Tiemann moves that the minutes of November 11, 2009 be approved. Mr. Gune seconds. Minutes approved with general consent.

Officer Reports

President’s Report:

Mr. Tiemann’s reports that he has addressed three action items since our last meeting:

  1. Continued outreach and help as best I can on the subject of our legal status. While it is unclear whether that was specifically helpful to the problem at hand, some other benefits of increased communication may be seen with respect to some of our historic financial accounts.
  2. Helped to effect some definitive progress on the administrative status of the OSI’s main servers, with the goal of being able to host some portions of the FLOSS competency center activities.
  3. Attempted to finalize the OSI’s allegations of use for its Class 41 trademark. Unfortunately, after multiple attempts, neither our trademark attorney nor our General Counsel responded to me.
  4. Proposed logistics for an OSI face-to-face in North Carolina for early next year.

I’d like to again thank Ms. Sharma for doing a fantastic job on several fronts: continued work with Mr. Gune on establishing the credentials of the OSI Education initiative, which is now being recognized by the public, her continued initiative with Mr. Oliver on the IT infrastructure front, and her proactive diligence in dealing with administrative matters and scheduling. I am sure I am not the only one grateful for such leadership and resourcefulness!

General Counsel’s Report:

  • Status (Mr. Radcliffe) – no report filed.

Secretary’s Report:

Ms. Sharma reports –

  • Please review the following board meeting minutes for approval.

    • November 11, 2009 – Monthly board meeting, November 2009
  • Approved board minutes have been posted on opensource.org.

    • October 14, 2009 – Monthly board meeting, October 2009

Ms. Cooper will coordinate with Ms. Sharma to get a mailbox key to her.

Treasurer’s Report:

Ms. Cooper reports –

  • Taxes: She will file pending taxes to the IRS by next week.
  • Corporate Status: Ms. Cooper has been coordinating with accounting firm and attorneys to file OSI paperwork.
  • PayPal account: Ms. Cooper coordinated with Mr. Rosen to reset OSI’s PayPal account.
  • Follow-up with Sun: Mr. Phipps and Ms. Cooper have both requested more information from Sun about status of gift for which she invoiced back in August.

Mr. Tiemann suggested that we send certified mail to Mr. Rosen.

Committee Reports

License Committee (Mr. Nelson)

As chair of the license approval committee, Mr. Nelson proposes the following:

Proposition #1: that we turn all approved licenses into generic templates even if submitted as party-specific licenses. This will immediately convert a number of licenses which are Mozilla instances into “See Mozilla Public License” references. It will also allow submitters of legacy licenses such as PostgreSQL and BlackBox to submit a license which they are merely users of, and allow us to accept that license as they received it, but approve it for use by the rest of the open source community.

Note that Proposition #1 is of Mr. Nelson’s own invention and has not been discussed on the mailing list. This email is going out long enough before the board meeting for sufficient discussion of its wisdom to happen. I will convey the result of that discussion to the board. It needs to be in the report because approval of BlackBox is dependent upon it.

Mr. Nelson reports the following set of licenses are under discussion.

Title: The PostgreSQL Licence
Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:931:nooneedaahagajmpehif
Original-Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:874:200909:kodinndfijkmchmflood
License: In the submission
Comments: Re-submitted as a general license. Asking for legacy approval.
Recommend: Approval

Title: The BlackBox Component Builder Open Source License
Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:887:200911:nlcjlommcajfndpfkoni
License: In the submission and http://www.oberon.ch/BlackBox.html
Comments: As Cowan says, it’s sleepycat with redundancies removed and the names replaced.
Recommend: Approval if Proposition #1 passes; send back for resubmission as generic template if #1 not passed.

Title: Falcon Programming Language License
Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:826:naokadpjdjicihdgloog
License: http://www.falconpl.org/index.ftd?page_id=license_1_1
Comments: Clearly OSD-compatible but … it’s the GPL with an added freedom to embed the language interpreter creating a single work without invoking the terms of the GPL. If that were it, then we could leave it there, but Giancarlo adds required attribution above and beyond that required by the GPL.
Recommend: Not different enough from the LGPL to warrant approval.

The board discussed the license committee report.

Mr. Nelson moves that the board accept the license committee recommendations with two changes. The first change is re: the PostgreSQL license which is currently under discussion. The board would like to know if it can use the MIT license instead. The second change states that the BlackBox Component Builder Open Source license submitters wait for Proposition #1 to be approved or use it as a generic template. Ms. Cooper seconds the motion. The motion is passed by general consent.

Membership / Governance Committee (Mr. Oliver)

Mr. Oliver reports that the Governance committee met and went over the membership document produced last time. Footnotes and explanations were added by Ms. Cooper. Our next step is to use that document to produce a draft proposal which we hope to do in January.

Ms. Cooper reports that the membership meeting was held for an hour. Ms. Cooper helped the committee to tighten the language to allow a diversity of membership organizations and individuals to participate at the OSI. She reports that the committee is about 50% there and will try to meet a couple of times before the face to face meeting in February. Ms. Sharma requests that a draft of the proposal be made available for review before the face-to-face meeting.

Education Committee (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma reports that she has been working with the Teaching Open Source project team towards organizing some POSSE camps with a computer science focus in the Bay Area.

IT Infrastructure Committee (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma reports some progress on the OSI IT infrastructure. She has been coordinating with Mr. Nelson to get sub-domains of opensource.org transferred to the new server. She also hopes that the DNS maintenance process will get simplified with Mr. Nelson’s support as IT functionality (e.g. mail, wikis, websites) gets setup on the new OSI server. She coordinated with Mr. Greant to get access setup for the new server to gear up for supporting new projects such as FLOSSCC.

Old Business

  • OSI Legal Status (Mr. Tiemann, Ms. Cooper)

Please see treasurer’s report above. Ms. Cooper reports that she will provide an update next month as things progress.

  • Trademark filing follow-up with General Counsel (Mr. Tiemann)

Mr. Tiemann will follow-up with Mr. Radcliffe and report by the next board meeting.

  • OSI Face to Face meeting (Mr. Tiemann)

Raleigh has been suggested as a possible venue for the next face to face meeting scheduled for February 2010. Mr. Tiemann has checked availability and logistics for the next face-to-face meeting and reports that he would be happy to try to host an OSI board meeting in North Carolina some time in the month of February. Possible dates include the weekend of February 26-28, 2009.

  • opensource.com and Red Hat follow-up (Mr. Sharma)

A discussion is in order about how the OSI can best work with Red Hat to ensure that the larger open source community is involved in an advisory capacity at opensource.com. Ms. Sharma is currently working on discussion points for working together on opensource.com with Red Hat’s team. The board would like to talk with Chris Grams of Red Hat. Ms. Sharma will work on setting a board call with Mr. Grams.

  • PDF on website for OSI trademark and logo usage agreement (Mr. Nelson)

A PDF version of the OSI trademark and logo usage agreement needs to be posted on the OSI website (opensource.org) for the public to access and use as needed. Mr. Nelson had committed during our July sprint that a version would be posted. Is this PDF available on the website?

Mr. Michlmayr will take this task of generating the PDF and link it to the trademark and logo usage pages on opensource.org.

  • OSI Online T-Shirt Shop (Mr. Coar)

Mr. Coar reports that there is no progress on the t-shirt shop. He has talked with Mr. Oliver about moving the t-shirt inventory to Mr. Oliver’s storage location. This will be done in January.

New Business

  • FLOSS Competency Center infrastructure (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma reports that she has been working with Mr. Tiemann and other members of the FLOSSCC initiative to gather the project’s infrastructure requirements and put together a support plan for FLOSSCC’s website infrastructure. The OSI is excited to be supporting FLOSSCC’s technical infrastructure. Please refer to the education and IT infrastructure committee reports too.

  • Teaching Open Source POSSE initiative (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma reports that she has been working with the Teaching Open Source project team towards organizing some POSSE camps in the Bay Area.

  • Process for recruiting new board members (Mr. Tiemann)

Ms. Sharma will create a document on OSI’s wiki to start the process of gathering recommendations for potential candidates.

  • FOSSBazaar initiatives that the OSI can participate in (Discussion)

Mr. Michlmayr will keep the board posted on licensing initiatives that FOSSBazaar may leverage the OSI for.

Motions for consideration by the board

  • Motion to approve minutes for November 11, 2009, monthly board meeting, November 2009

Mr. Tiemann moves that the minutes of November 11, 2009 be approved. Mr. Gune seconds. Minutes approved unanimously.

  • Motion to approve or reject recommendations of license committee

Mr. Nelson moves that the board accept the license committee recommendations with two changes. The first change is re: the PostgreSQL license which is currently under discussion. The board would like to know if it can use the MIT license instead. The second change states that the BlackBox Component Builder Open Source license submitters wait for Proposition #1 to be approved or use it as a generic template. Ms. Cooper seconds the motion. The motion is passed by general consent.

Next Board Meeting

The next OSI BOD meeting is scheduled for January 6, 2010.

Meeting Adjourned at 09:50 AM PST.