Modernizing Our Mission Statement
We have reworked our mission statement. First of all, our positions have not changed but the activities that we focus on going forward will continue to extend beyond license approval. We remain stewards of the Open Source Definition (aka OSD) but we will also be looking for other ways to support, grow and maintain the open source ecosystem.
Our old mission statement was pretty wordy and didn’t succinctly encompass all the work that we do anymore. The OSI finds itself in a very different place than we were when we started. Open source software is everywhere now and the tech landscape has changed quite a bit. The needs of the open source community are more varied and little more complicated than they were in 1998. We aim to meet the needs of a larger, more global community and that means declaring our intent to embrace change and update our tactics.
NEW: As steward of the OSD, we set the foundation for the open source software ecosystem.
OLD: We are the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD) and the community-recognized body for reviewing and approving licenses as OSD-conformant.
This change is part of a year-long strategic planning process where we are looking ahead to what we can accomplish in the future. With this new, tidier mission statement as a rudder, we’ll be exploring new tactics, modernizing our outreach and assessing what processes and infrastructure we’ll need to accelerate the next 20 years of open source. We hope you like our new, clearer mission statement and we welcome your voice and support in the work to make it a reality.