OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 15:08 UTC.

Attendees

Board Members

  1. Ms. Deborah Bryant, Director
  2. Mr. Karl Fogel, Director
  3. Mr. Harshad Gune, Director (on IRC)
  4. Mr. Jim Jagielski, Director
  5. Mr. Martin Michlmayr, President and Secretary
  6. Mr. Mike Milinkovich, Director
  7. Mr. Luis Villa, Director
  8. Mr. Tony Wasserman, Director

Guests and Observers

None.

Expected, but Not Present

  1. Mr. Ken Coar, Board Observer
  2. Ms. Danese Cooper, Board Observer
  3. Mr. Russell Nelson, Board Observer
  4. Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Board Observer
  5. Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel
  6. Ms. Alolita Sharma, Treasurer

Sent Regrets

  1. Mr. Simon Phipps, Director
  2. Mr. Fabio Kon, Director

Agenda

  1. Minutes Review and Approval
  2. Officer Reports
  3. Committee Reports
  4. Old Business
  5. New Business
  6. Action items
  7. Next Board Meeting

Minutes Review and Approval

The Board reviewed the minutes of the March meetings. Mr. Fogel moved that the Board approve the minutes. Mr. Jagielski seconded. Minutes approved by general consent.

Officer Reports

President’s Report (Mr. Michlmayr)

Mr. Michlmayr would like to welcome the new directors to the OSI board and looks forward to working with them. He would also like to thank the outgoing directors for their significant contributions to the OSI.

Secretary’s Report (Mr. Michlmayr)

  • The following minutes have to be reviewed by the Board for approval:
    • March 7, 2012
    • March 16, 2012
  • The following approved minutes have been posted to opensource.org:
    • February 1, 2012

Treasurer’s Report (Ms. Sharma)

No report submitted.

General Counsel’s Report (Mr. Radcliffe)

No report submitted.

Committee Reports

(Listed in alphabetical order)

Education Committee (Mr. Kon)

Mr. Wasserman reports:

  • FOSS Competence Centers: there have been a number of meetings at Open World Forum in Paris in the last few years and approximately 20 people attended. Mr. Wasserman would like to attract more members. He is planning to publicize the effort at LinuxCon in San Diego.
  • FLOSS Body of Knowledge: Mr. Wasserman is planning to identify topics that should be covered. He is motivated to work on the FLOSS Body of Knowledge since he is teaching a class on open source this summer.

Mr. Fogel remarked that Mel Chua might be interested in contributing to the FLOSS Body of Knowledge but couldn’t work out from the web site how to engage. Mr. Wasserman said that she should get in contact with him.

License Committee (Mr. Fogel)

Mr. Fogel reports:

  • CeCILL 2.1 in review; have responded to submitters with questions, am awaiting answers. See thread.
  • New FAQ entries on public domain and CC0, due to increasing frequency of inquiries. So far we have agreement from Josh Berkus, Larry Rosen, Russ Nelson, Rick Moen, and Jim Jagielski. This is a good sign :-).
  • Put “FAQ” and “Trademark and Logo Usage” entries at the top level in the left-side navigation menu on the front page.
  • iSEEEULA 1.0 submitted and rejected pretty quickly (it’s not really a license, and the submitters never answered why an existing license wouldn’t do)
  • Talking loosely with Luis Villa about how to split licenses into “recommended” and “everything else”, and have started drafting a page
  • Added agenda item for face-to-face meeting to talk about how we do license review, spurred by CC0 result (in which I do not have confidence).
  • Question raised by Johnny Solbu about old-style MIT License (see thread). No formal resolution, because no one formally submitted the license, but consensus seems to be that it is a GPL-compatible open source license — and is one of many MIT variants floating around out there.

Mr. Oliver drafted a trademark violation notice, which Mr. Fogel sent to a web site.

Membership-Governance Committee (Mr. Phipps)

Mr. Phipps reports:

In March:

  • Debian accepted our invitation to join the Affiliate scheme
  • The Affiliates have been discussing the Affiliate Agreement

In April:

  • The Board will finalise the Affiliate Agreement and ask Affiliates to sign it
  • We will initiate Affiliate discussions on a personal membership scheme (“Advocates”?)

Ms. Bryant noted that she had been in contact with some open source organizations that would like to join OSI as affiliates but they cannot find any information on opensource.org on how to become an affiliate. She expressed concerns that we have done press releases while there is no vehicle for new organizations to get included. Mr. Wasserman pointed Ms. Bryant to Mr. Phipps’ blog posting from February which contains some information. Ms. Bryant thought information on how to join as an affiliate should be posted as an article on our web site. She offered to help if she can get the technical details on what is means to be an affiliate.

Ms. Bryant also noted that a potential affiliate sent an email to our contact address but received no response. Nobody remembered receiving this email, and Mr. Michlmayr raised his suspicion that there’s a problem with email since he hadn’t seen any email requests in weeks. The Infrastructure Committee will investigate.

Policy and Economic Development Committee (Mr. Tiemann)

No report submitted.

Administrative Committees

Communications Committee (Mr. Phipps)

Mr. Phipps reports:

In March:

  • On behalf of OSI, Mr. Phipps spoke at FLOSS UK Spring 12, and Mr. Jagielski and Ms. Bryant spoke at POSSCON
  • Mr. Phipps established a shared folder on github (accessible using SparkleShare) for public materials
  • OSI published a statement naming new Directors
  • OSI published a statement welcoming Debian and CENATIC to the Affiliates
  • Mr. Wasserman re-activated the Google+ page and added the Board as maintainers. Mr. Phipps posted the election results to it.

In April:

  • The Board will continue postings to Google+

IT Infrastructure Committee (Mr. Oliver)

Mr. Fogel reports:

  • Restored Redmine service.
  • Noted Mr. Phipps’s public SparkleShare+github area (see above in Communications Committee); we might also benefit from using ownCloud.

New Projects / Outreach Committee (Ms. Sharma)

No report submitted.

Old Business

Review of Action Items

  • Mr. Fogel: work on a plan on splitting license list into recommended and other licenses. Status: Mr. Fogel has started a draft page and will share the link soon after this meeting.
  • Mr. Fogel: work on a plan to migrate www.opensource.org to our hosted server. Status: Mr. Fogel does not have time for this at the moment. Mr. Michlmayr said that he might be able to work on this.
  • Mr. Fogel: investigate method to import old mailing list archives. Status: Mr. Fogel noted that it’s possible to convert the archive but he doesn’t have time since this is too low on his list of priorities. Mr. Michlmayr said he might be able to work on this. Ms. Bryant said that we could ask OSU-OSL for help.
  • Mr. Fogel to respond to SPDX issues spreadsheet from Jilayne Lovejoy. Status: Mr. Fogel has not responded but it’s high on his list.
  • Mr. Kon and Mr. Wasserman: work on article on open source for ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN. Status: Mr. Wasserman said that this is still on their list but not very high priority.
  • Mr. Wasserman: post FLOSSCC Vision document to opensource.org (either as blog or document). Status: Mr. Wasserman remarked that this has been posted to http://www.flosscc.org/manifesto some time ago.
  • Mr. Wasserman: describe requirements for site for Open Source Body of Knowledge. Status: current site meets all requirements.
  • Mr. Wasserman: write blog article about results of membership survey.
  • Mr. Jagielski, Mr. Wasserman and Ms. Sharma: work on draft for personal membership scheme. Status: Mr. Jagielski remarked that a draft exists now.

New Business

  • Resolution thanking Michael Tiemann for his service: Mr. Fogel would like to formally thank Michael Tiemann for his excellent service and sensitive leadership over the years. He wrote up a short blog posting and the board agreed that this was a great idea. Mr. Fogel would also like to welcome our new directors.
  • Can we get the face-to-face agenda page up now, so we have a place to put ideas/topics? Mr. Fogel said that one item he would put on such a page is: concerns about structural issues with license-review. We get a lot of feedback, often very useful, but the actual number of qualified lawyers chiming in is very small. If we had professional help, would the CC0 outcome have been the same? Mr. Michlmayr said that an agenda page exists already and gave a link.
  • Trademarks policy enforcement and documentation
  • May 2 meeting: Mr. Milinkovich asked whether the May 2 phone meeting will take place given that we’re meeting in person in May. Mr. Phipps noted that the pre-face-to-face meeting is usually used for planning the agenda and logistics. The board agreed to hold the meeting but would try to keep it to one rather than two hours.
  • Do we need a replacement for the Policy and Economic Development Committee chair? Committee chairs will be discussed and appointed at the face-to-face meeting in Chicago in May.

Action Items

  • Mr. Michlmayr: investigate whether OSI email contact address is working.
  • Mr. Phipps, Ms. Bryant: write down criteria for OSI Affiliates and publish on web site.

Next Board Meeting

The next OSI BOD meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, May 2, 2012.

Meeting adjourned at 16:24 UTC.