OSI Spring 2020 Newsletter

Welcome to the Open Source Initiative’s quarterly newsletter. We hope the information shared in each edition provides you with interesting insights into our initiatives and activities. We also hope to include updates regarding our members and affiliates, as well as the broader open source software community. If you have any ideas for what we cover, or content to include, please feel free to let us know at contact@lists.opensource.org.

OSI News & Updates

A World-wide Open Source Summit: Build your local community, while engaging the global community.

The State of the Source Summit invites open source communities of practice from around the world to organize and contribute to a global conversation on the current state of open source software: non-technical issues that foster development and community, the licenses that enable collaboration, the practices that promote contribution, and the issues confronting cooperation.

Learn more here.

We hope you will consider presenting on a topic of interest and invite you to submit your presentation to the State of the Source Call for Proposals.

The State of the Source will be a global event and provides tremendous opportunities to directly engage with the open source software community and support the work of the Open Source Initiative. We hope you will join us in our efforts to create broader awareness, increase understanding, and address issues to help educate and build bridges between open source software communities.

Deadline for sponsorship commitment, August 25th (or until all opportunities filled).

For more information, or to confirm your sponsorship of the State of the Source Summit, please email jenn.cummings@opensource.org.

 

Congratulations to the OSI’s new Board President Josh Simmons and Vice President Hung Phuc Dang on their recent elections!

The Open Source Initiative is excited to welcome Josh Simmons as our new Board President and Hong Phuc Dang as our new Board Vice President. 

In the four years Josh has been on the OSI board, he has served as CFO, VP, and Chair of the Staffing Committee. He has deepened relationships with FLOSS organizations around the world, represented OSI’s views at summits and meetings, and has worked to build consensus in even the most fractious of times. He is a web developer, armchair philosopher, and open source strategist starting his fifth year on the OSI board. 

“When I first ran for election to the OSI board, I never imagined that someday I’d be its President, and yet now it feels like a natural progression! It’s very humbling. Our board is packed with experts and I’m excited to focus on facilitating so they can do their best work.” – OSI Board President Josh Simmons.

Hong founded FOSSASIA in 2009 as a community devoted to improving people’s lives through sharing open technologies, knowledge and fostering global connections. Over a decade, she steers the organization, directs project teams, runs events and education programs, encourages open source participation across Asia. Hong also acts as an InnerSource manager at Zalando where she helps to bring open source best practices within the corporate walls and supports the company to become a good open source citizen.

“I am proud to serve as the new Vice President of OSI. I want to make sure the OSI represents the voice of open source communities across the world. Together we play our part in sustaining the open source ecosystem.” – OSI Board Vice President Hong Phuc Dang.

 

Committing to Community throughout the COVID-19 Crisis

Each year the Open Source Initiative relies on the dedicated contributions of individual open source developers and advocates, OSI members, and corporate sponsors. This year, with the global pandemic now affecting so many communities, funding priorities have rightly changed: new initiatives that need dedicated support have emerged, yet many fundamental organizations still need continued support to deliver core services.

Each year the OSI attends over 20 events to meet with sponsors and secure annual funding. With so many events now canceled, our primary channel for fundraising and development has simply disappeared. We recognize many organizations may be struggling themselves and unable to contribute. Individuals too are facing unprecedented pressures, facing professional uncertainties and personal loss.

Yet in one way–perhaps small, but not insignificant–the Open Source Software movement and community is both inspired and inspiring. The Open Source Software community has come together to collaborate, contribute, and co-create to combat the COVID-19 crisis. Every day we’re thrilled to discover new communities of practice emerging in response to the demands faced in combating and ultimately curing COVD-19. Learn more about these inspiring projects here.

 

Charting a Course for 2020 and Beyond

This is an interesting time for open source.

An approach to intellectual property that was once seen as radical is now mainstream. In 2011, 13 years after “open source” was coined and the Open Source Initiative was founded to promote and protect it, O’Reilly Media declared that open source had won. In 2016, WIRED followed suit. Now, open source undergirds software development across a truly unfathomable range of applications and fans the flames of other open culture movements. It has inspired new ways of collaborating with each other, experiments in community governance, and has been so successful that it is colloquially taken to mean all of the above.

And yet, open source feels so tenuous sometimes. Questions dog us. Setting aside run-of-the-mill fear, uncertainty, and doubt, people are raising legitimate questions: are our projects sustainable? Are our communities safe and healthy? Are maintainers being treated fairly? Is our work just? Can open source weather continued attempts at redefinition?

These concerns are not new, but the scale they’re playing out on is. And Open Source Initiative–though it has sustained its core mission around licensing for 22 years, slogging through the legal janitorial work that makes open source adoption easy–has simply not been a leading voice in these other conversations.

Even on the topic of licensing, OSI has been found on its back foot. Our response to the recent flare ups of open core and source available licensing was lackluster. Everyone agrees: open source needs a bolder, more responsive, and representative OSI.

How do we get there? We have a plan, and you’re part of it. Read more from OSI president Josh Simmons.

 

New OSI Affiliate Members

OpenJS Foundation Joins Open Source Initiative as New Affiliate Member

The Open Source Initiative® (OSI), the international authority in open source licensing, is excited to announce the affiliate membership of the OpenJS Foundation, the premier home for critical open source JavaScript projects, including Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Node.js, and webpack, and 30 more. The OpenJS membership with the OSI highlights the incredible impact of JavaScript across all industries, web technologies, communities, and, ultimately, the open source software movement. Read more here.

 

OASIS Open Joins Open Source Initiative

Shared vision and combined resources extend both organizations’ ability to advance open source through standards. We are excited to announce the Affiliate Membership of OASIS Open, a global nonprofit consortium managing a broad technical agenda encompassing cybersecurity, blockchain, privacy, cryptography, cloud computing, IoT, urban mobility, emergency management, and other content technologies. Read more here.

 

OSI Affiliate Updates

The OSI Affiliate Program allows non-profit and not-for-profit organizations to become OSI members. The program is now open for applications.

Apereo Foundation

Associazione LibreItalia 

 

The American International University

 

BigBlueButton

BreathingGames

  • Coronavirus Openkit
    Coronavirus-openkit.net emerges from the project Open Village, a collaboration between the Geneva Health Forum and the Open Geneva festival (3500 participants).

CAVO

  • California Association of Voting Officials would like to announce the addition of Ted Selker and Kath Delaney to the CAVO Board of Directors. Professor Selker was a founding member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project and spent 4 years as co-director of it as well. Ted helped organize several of the first national voting technology conferences in service of understanding the problems and alternatives available for voting. Ted has taught a voting technology classes at MIT, at CMU and talked about it at venues from the American Association for theAdvancement of Science to local election official’s offices.

Kath Delaney has been a social change organizer for more than 30 years. She is a senior consultant and strategist with expertise in leadership development, multi-channel fundraising, and digital marketing. Kath founded Madera Group, a San Francisco Bay Area agency dedicated to advising progressive philanthropists, non-profits executives, social impact leaders, and political candidates in growing their base of support, building operational capacity and moving their mission and vision forward. 

Creative Commons

Debian

DigitalOcean

  • DigitalOcean introduces Virtual Private Cloud, which once enabled, allows customers to create a second network interface that is only accessible by resources within the private network. 
  • DigitalOcean launched the Hub For Good to support projects during covid-19. We’ve committed $100,000 in hosting credit and invested $50,000 towards non-profits on the front lines.

Drupal Association

Eclipse Foundation 

FOSSASIA

  • FOSSASIA Summit 2020 Takes Places as Online and Offline Event
  • FOSSASIA’s goal is to open up everything by default and Open Hardware comes next! The PSLab team is currently working on the next version of the Pocket Science Lab, which will come with the option to work as an independent external data logger and includes an SD card and battery. And, in August the Eventyay team will release a new version of the event management system supporting Call for Papers for academic online events.

 

FreeBSD

FUSS

Gnome

  • The Community Engagement Challenge is an exciting new opportunity to create projects that engage beginning coders with the free and open-source software (FOSS) community. Our goal is for individuals or teams to submit stimulating ideas that will connect the next generation of coders to the FOSS community and keep them involved for years to come. We are offering over $65,000 in prizes with over $20,000 going to the winner. 

Internet Systems Consortium 

Joomla! (Open Source Matters)

Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)

  • Call for Editors
    JOSS is recruiting editors with expertise in bioinformatics, material science, physics, R/statistics, and the social sciences.

Linux Foundation

Linux Professional Institute

Mifos

Mozilla Foundation

Network Time Foundation

New Zealand Open Source Society

 

Odoo Community Association 

Open edX

Open Preservation Foundation

OpenProject

Open Research Institute

Open Source Design

OSEHRA

OpenMRS

OpenStreetMap

OW2

Plone Foundation

Powering Potential

Python Software Foundation

Software Freedom Conservancy

Sourcefabric

sysarmy

The Perl Foundation

Tiki Software Community Association 

TYPO3 Association

Wikimedia Foundation

WordPress Foundation

Xerte Project 

 

Affiliate members – Do you have any information you would like to share? Send us your latest news and updates and we will include them in future newsletters.