• The affiliate organizations will elect one director
• Individual members will elect two directors

The results of elections for both Individual and Affiliate member board seats are advisory with the OSI Board making the formal appointments to open seats based on the community’s votes.

Sign up before March 8 to become a full individual member (Supporting or Professional) and vote. Voting ends on March 18 at 5:00 pm GMT (10:00 am PST).

The role of the board of directors

The board of directors is the ultimate authority responsible for the Open Source Initiative as a California public benefit corporation, with 501(c)3 tax-exempt status. The board’s responsibilities include oversight of the organization, approving the budget and supporting the executive director and staff to fulfill its mission. The OSI isn’t a volunteer-run organization anymore and the role of the directors has changed accordingly.

Each director is expected to be a counsel and a guide for staff rather than an active contributor. Directors should guide discussions, support the vision and mission of the organization, and advocate for the OSI. They’re also asked to support the fundraising efforts however they feel comfortable doing.

The board is governed by the bylaws. Each board member is expected to sign the board member agreement. Depending on expertise and availability, directors are expected to serve on the active committees: the license, fundraising, standards and financial committees.

Candidates will be asked to share their ideas on how they’ll contribute to the vision and mission, and the 2024 strategic objectives.

The rules for how OSI runs the elections are published on our website. We’ll communicate more details in the coming weeks: stay tuned for announcements on our social media channels (Fediverse, LinkedIn, X/Twitter)

Communications with Affiliate organizations and Individual members have been delivered via email, with instructions and ballots. If you consider you were elegible for voting, but haven’t heard from us, please get in touch before March 18th.

Members of the DPGA include governments and their agencies, multilateral organizations including UN entities, philanthropic foundations, funders, think tanks and technology companies. Deb Bryant serves as the OSI liaison, and Stefano Maffulli led an AI workshop at the annual meeting in Ethiopia in November.

In its recently released State of the Digital Public Goods Ecosystem 2023 report, the DPG-related work and contributions of DPGA member entities are highlighted. For the OSI, our featured work includes participation in and collaboration with the DPGA’s Community of Practice (CoP) on AI which advocates for responsible use of AI. The DPGA agrees that an Open Source AI definition that embodies principles of transparency and clarity will be crucial to supporting wider efforts towards responsible AI. We look forward to continued collaboration with DPGA and its members.

You can learn more about the DPGA on X/Twitter and LinkedIn.

Coming from long backgrounds in Open Source, founders Aleksei Palazhchenko, Peter Zaitsev and Peter Farkas believe that standards and definitions are imperative to the survival of Open Source, which is why FerretDB is a strong supporter of OSI. They also see vendor lock-in as a real danger, one that can result in extremely costly migrations if a user chose to move their data from a proprietary service to an Open Source one. At present, MongoDB is the default choice for document databases, but when it switched from Affero General Public License (AGPL) to Server Side Public License (SSPL) license in 2018, these Open Source veterans felt that the move introduced limits in choice, competition and innovation, and they knew something had to be done about it.

FerretDB was started in 2021 to be an Open Source alternative to MongoDB. The founders support the OSI authority over what is and is not Open Source, and the SSPL license MongoDB moved to is not an OSI-approved license. The SSLP license allows cloud providers to offer MongoDB as a service, but it requires those providers to pay a licensing fee. What may have been designed to protect MongoDB from infrastructure providers who don’t contribute back to the project also limits the user, and can no longer be considered Open Source.

With an allegiance to true Open Source and a commitment to preserving the integrity of Open Source for future generations, FerretDB was established under the OSI-approved Apache 2.0 license. It was built on top of PostgreSQL, an existing Open Source database that has a strong and active community. This choice was made because starting a new database from the ground up could take ten years to build and add the required depth of functionality, not to mention the trust of users.

Additionally, the Document Database Community was created with the aim of getting all document database vendors, experts and users together. The community holds monthly webinars to foster communication and form connections among stakeholders.

“We think that open source is in danger as more and more companies are trying to redefine Open Source, with licenses such as BSL or SSPL,” said Farkas. “We sponsor OSI because we believe that OSI is the point of reference when it comes to the definition of Open Source, and it should stay this way. OSI’s approach is helping to move the industry forward.”

FerretDB is a VC-funded company, so its founders are interested in making a profit through service, support, and as-a-service options But, the product itself will always be free. FerretDB released FerretDB 1.0 earlier this year, the first version which is capable of running MongoDB workloads and supporting MongoDB tools. Features continue to be added based on the requests of the community. FerretDB-as-a-service is available on the European infrastructure provider, Scaleway, as well as on Civo with plans for enterprise-level support in the future.

If you would like to participate in the development of document database standards, you can share your input at www.documentdatabase.org.

Below is the text of the letter we sent.

June 16, 2023
Katherine K. Vidal
Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property
and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office
United States Patent and Trademark Office
600 Dulany Street
Alexandria, VA 22314-5796

Dear Director Vidal,

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a California 501(c)(3) public charity advocating for and enabling the benefits of open source (community developed and maintained) software in the interests of every citizen. It does not advocate on behalf of any for-profit entity or any political group.

We very much appreciate that the USPTO has provided the opportunity for input on this important matter in advance of the formal rulemaking process. OSI is writing in particular to provide information for your consideration regarding the use of third-party entities to challenge patents.

The oversight of each open source project is usually in the hands of an unincorporated association of individual contributors, or a dedicated public charity (like OSI’s 80+ Affiliate members). Many of the leaders in these communities are entrepreneurs leading small businesses. Open source projects use OSI-approved licenses, which openly convey all rights necessary to use, improve, share and otherwise enjoy the software without any necessary relationship with its rights holders. As such, no open source project depends on patents and communities rarely tolerate royalty-due elements, preferring to design without any encumbered parts.

Open source projects and their maintainers are uniquely vulnerable to attack by hostile parties such as patent trolls (sometimes called “non-practicing entities”) and companies rent-seeking over so-called standard-essential patents. The projects and their non-profit fiduciary hosts are not of a scale to be able to manage the usual defenses of large corporations, while the individuals themselves may seem worthwhile targets for avaricious litigators. When a project faces a patent attack, it is thus frequently defended by others as a matter of civic duty.

The rule changes that the Patent and Trademark Office propose would greatly limit the ability of open source projects to be defended by these third parties. This would both chill the innovation and progress arising from open source software – which contributes billions to GDP – as well as embolden malicious litigators seeking reward where they have no claim simply because their victim is unable to defend themselves.

OSI consequently encourages the USPTO to reconsider these rule changes and avoid the harm they would cause open source software.

Your sincerely,

Stefano Maffulli
Executive Director
Open Source Initiative

Open Source Initiative is a 501(c)(3) corporation (EIN:  91-2037395).

With this study, Open Future was interested in identifying trends that transform the movement and understanding the challenges and needs of activists and organizations as these changes occur.

They also set out to understand how and whether the open movement can be perceived as a whole. There have been studies and reports focused on a single field of openness, such as Open Access or Open Data, but relatively few attempts to understand this broader activist space. This most recent study focused on a qualitative survey of open movement leaders.

The report, which you can read in its entirety here, can be summarized into sections:

Speaking with open movement leaders

Most interviewees reported learning of the open movement through participation in copyright reform activism and policy. Others were introduced through:

• Open Source and Open Hardware activism
• Open Knowledge, Open Access, Open Education, or Open Data activism
• Community-building work
• Their employers, entering the field with no previous activist background

Open Activism as a social movement

Open Future proposed the following working definition for the open movement:

The open movement consists of people, communities, and organizations who (1) contribute to shared resources online that are available for everyone to use and reuse, (2) and/or advocate for non-exclusive access and use of information resources.

However, although the research project began with the assumption that there is an open movement which can be defined and whose boundaries can be traced, the interviews found that there is little collective sense of such a movement. Moreso, there is a collective sense of the open movement as a loose network, tied together by value alignment.

The open movement, at a turning point as seen by its leaders

This section shows how the movement is shifting. Interviewees have been observing changes, and argue for further change. Open Future analyzed these shifts in four categories:

1. The people
2. The zeitgeist
3. The world
4. The sustainability of the open movement

The need for change

Factors both internal and external to the movement were identified in the study. Collectively, the following needs were revealed:

• Need for new voices
• Need for new narratives
• Need for relevance
• Need for maintenance

Ways forward

To address these needs, those interviewed resonated strongly with two ways forward:

1. A shared agenda
2. Advocacy as a driver for collective action

You can download a full copy of the report at this link: https://openfuture.eu/publication/shifting-tides/

You can provide feedback directly in the publication here or by writing to Alek Tarkowski at alek@openfuture.eu.

Images created by Open Future.

The lack of a shared definition of what Open Source AI means is a problem also for upcoming regulation, like the European AI Act. One of the drafts of the act tries to carve exceptions for “Open Source AI” but nobody knows what that means.

The time has come for the community to define “Open Source AI”, for regulators, but also for developers, lawyers, researchers and end users. We need clarity in order to replicate in AI the success of the Open Source software ecosystem.

For this, we just announced a series of initiatives for the rest of 2023 and into 2024 to define “Open Source AI.” The first is an open call for proposals for the Deep Dive webinar series: we want to hear your thoughts on this topic. We’re all tired of over-hyped conversations, misinformation and confusion. With the Deep Dive webinar series we’d like to focus on identifying the principles we can agree will not further damage society.

The OSI will also start a public, global, multi-stakeholder consultation with the goal to draft a definition. In the next few weeks we’ll share more details.

I hold weekly office hours on Fridays with OSI members: book time if you want to chat about OSI’s activities, if you want to volunteer or have suggestions.

Stefano Maffulli

Executive Director, OSI 

In this month’s Open Source Initiative Newsletter:

• The AI renaissance and why Open Source matters
• Regulatory language cannot be the same for all software
• Why open video is vital for Open Source
• Webinar: ClearlyDefined proceeding towards a clear governance structure
• Another issue with the Cyber Resilience Act: European standards bodies are inaccessible to Open Source projects
• The Cyber Resilience Act introduces uncertainty and risk leaving Open Source projects confused
• Notable open source news

The AI renaissance and why Open Source matters

Sharing knowledge and sharing code has always been a key driver for innovation in Artificial Intelligence. Researchers have gathered together since AI was established as a field to develop and advance novel techniques, from Natural Language Processing to Artificial Neural Networks, from Machine Learning to Deep Learning.

The world of AI is at an important crossroads. There are two paths forward: one where highly regulated proprietary code, models, and datasets are going to prevail, or one where Open Source dominates.

Regulatory language cannot be the same for all software

In reviewing the language and concepts being used in the various draft bills and directives circulating in Brussels at present, it is clear that the experts crafting the language are using their understanding of proprietary software to build the protections they clearly intend for Open Source. This may be the cause of the problems we continue to see as the instruments iterate, especially in the absence of direct consultation.

Why open video is vital for Open Source

The news that the European Commission’s competition directorate (DG COMP) has decided not to conduct a full antitrust investigation into the Alliance for Open Media’s (AOM) licensing policy is to be welcomed, especially for the AV1 CODEC specification (successor to the VP9 CODEC and intended to allow royalty-free, high-quality video streaming). It seems that whispering voices had falsely suggested the reciprocal licensing of standard-essential patents (SEPs) in AOM’s policy is somehow anti-competitive.

Webinar: ClearlyDefined proceeding towards a clear governance structure

The ClearlyDefined project was invited to give an update as part of the OpenChain webinar series. I had the opportunity to share with this global community the project’s mission: to create a global database of licensing metadata for every Open Source software component ever published. This was a great opportunity to introduce our work towards an improved governance structure. ClearlyDefined Community Manager Nick Vidal goes more in depth here.

Another issue with the Cyber Resilience Act: European standards bodies are inaccessible to Open Source projects

There’s a crucial issue here for Open Source. EU policy experts say not to worry about CRA compliance because the EU standards bodies will streamline it. But the European Standardization Organizations (ESO) are corporate-controlled, patent-loving and expensive to engage. Shouldn’t the EU address this if they want Open Source accommodated? Standards & EU Policy Director Simon Phipps explains more in this recent blog post.

The Cyber Resilience Act introduces uncertainty and risk leaving Open Source projects confused

What might happen if the uncertainty persists around who is held responsible under the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)? The global Open Source community is averse to legal risks and generally lacks access to counsel, so it’s very possible offers of source code will simply be withdrawn rather than seeking to resolve the uncertainty.

OSI in the news

• Open source and sustainability – where’s the gap? Today, one of the biggest problems our society faces is climate change and the rapidly deteriorating environment and there are those that believe that the problem will be fixed (at least in part) by new technologies. 
• Open source community on warpath with Europe: they are not to blame for cyber security problems. In an open letter to the European Commission, a dozen developers from the open source community have said that the cybersecurity law, as currently written, could have a “devastating effect” on their work.
• Defend Open Source from Trolls: Oppose Patent Rule Changes. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is inviting public comment on proposals that would eliminate third parties’ ability to help clean up bad patents.

OSI featured this issue on the blog in April, 2023: GNOME patent troll stripped of patent rights

These organizations are submitting a call for help to secure free software patent defense by submitting a comment, and the deadline is June 20, 2023 to do so.

To summarize some of the key points of the webinar, which you can watch here:

• Inter Partes Review (IPR) was established in 2013 as a procedure for challenging the validity of a United States patent before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This process isn’t perfect, but it has been helping to hold patent trolls accountable and protect companies that are sued for using software that is falsely patented.
• The cost to defend a lawsuit from patent trolls is so exorbitant, a small business’ only real option is to pay the patent troll, sending many of them into bankruptcy.
• The rule changes being proposed by the government are making it harder for anyone to file a challenge against this type of patent, they’re making the process longer, more difficult and adding limits to who can challenge the patents at all.
• All of this may prompt patent trolls to demand even more money, knowing the process of challenging their lawsuits is even more difficult and costly.

What you can do

Submit comments to the USPTO!

An Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) has been issued, giving people the ability to submit a comment in response to these changes. The deadline to submit a comment is June 20, 2023.

Image created by the Linux Foundation.

Open Source maintainers are the cornerstone of collaborative software development. They dedicate their time and expertise to ensure the smooth functioning and growth of Open Source projects. As gatekeepers of the code, they review contributions, manage repositories, and maintain the software’s integrity. They provide guidance, mentorship, and support to the community of contributors, fostering an inclusive environment for developers of all levels. Maintainers also serve as community managers, facilitating discussions and resolving conflicts. 

Their voluntary contributions result in significant technological advancements, yet their role as volunteers is too often mischaracterized. Even when paid by corporations, maintainers of Open Source projects do it on a voluntary basis. This is hard to comprehend. Recognizing and supporting their efforts is crucial for the sustainability of projects. 

Open Source maintainers are the driving force behind the success of collaborative software development, and their dedication deserves our appreciation and support.

I hold weekly office hours on Fridays with OSI members: book time if you want to chat about OSI’s activities, if you want to volunteer or have suggestions.

Stefano Maffulli

Executive Director, OSI

In this month’s Open Source Initiative Newsletter:

• What Is Open Governance? Drafting a charter for an Open Source project
• The importance of Open Source AI and the challenges of liberating data
• Things I learned at Brussels to the Bay: AI governance in the world
• Open Source ensures code remains a part of culture
• Salesforce: Why we sponsor OSI

What Is Open Governance? Drafting a charter for an Open Source project

Building a healthy Open Source community is much more than just choosing an Open Source license for the project. It involves creating a contributing guide, adopting a code of conduct, and establishing an open governance structure that allows all members to actively participate in and contribute to the project.

This article by ClearlyDefined Community Manager Nick Vidal provides a hands on guide on how to establish an open governance structure for an Open Source project. In fact, he is currently in the process of proposing an amendment to the existing charter of the ClearlyDefined project.

The importance of Open Source AI and the challenges of liberating data

The values in Open Source are encapsulated in its Definition, but can be distilled to “autonomy, transparency, frictionless innovation, education, community improvement”. The licenses are a way to enable these things in the face of copyright law that defaults to the contrary. The licenses are not the mechanism to achieve these goals. Instead it’s the community and innovation that they produce when you remove legal barriers to collaboration.

This blog post by Executive Director Stefano Maffulli was taken from a speech given remotely at LLW 2023.

Things I learned at Brussels to the Bay: AI governance in the world

Recently Executive Director Stefano Maffulli participated in Brussels to the Bay: AI governance in the world, a conference hosted by Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) and EU in the US, to learn more about the status of international policies on AI. Here is his takeaway.

Open Source ensures code remains a part of culture

Software is a cultural artifact, a proxy for the law in the lives of every citizen, a tool for control and for freedom depending on the hand that wields it.  It is imperative that all software is open for scrutiny and preserved for posterity. Standards & EU Policy Director Simon Phipps explains further in this blog post.

Salesforce: Why we sponsor OSI

We asked Alyssa Gravelle, Salesforce Senior Program Manager, Open Source to share the organization’s intrinsic ties to Open Source, its reasons for supporting the Open Source Initiative, and its hopes for the Open Source movement. Here’s what she said.

Are you interested in sponsoring or partnering with the OSI? Contact us to find out more about how your organization can promote open source development, communities and software

Image by peshkov from Getty Images via Canva.com

This sort of confusion reaches the highest levels of the policy-making process. 

A lot of issues found in the text of the European Cyber Resilience Act, for example, stem from one misstep: the Open Source communities haven’t been consulted. Why? And how do we fix this?

As OSI’s director of policy and standards Simon Phipps wrote, the lack of early engagement with a wider set of Open Source experts explains why the drafters of the CRA have misunderstood the meaning of “Commercial” when referred to Open Source. 

At OSI we’ve stepped up our advocacy and outreach program to educate the wider community. We just wrapped up the first License Clinic for lawyers and employees of US federal agencies and we’ve started planning for the next one, in Brussels. Stay tuned for details: the License Clinic is a staple of our programs.

We want to make sure that there are no missteps when large, consequential legislation is drafted and OSI and its Affiliates are consulted.

Become a Supporting or Professional member today. Your contribution supports OSI’s work to educate lawyers and civil servants around the world about the values of Open Source.

I hold weekly office hours on Fridays with OSI members: book time if you want to chat about OSI’s activities, if you want to volunteer or have suggestions.

Stefano Maffulli

Executive Director, OSI 

In this month’s Open Source Initiative’s newsletter

• Results of 2023 elections of OSI board of directors
• Containers can be safer with Open Source
• April 4th License Clinic in Washington DC
• Diving in to Open Source supply chain; connecting and collaborating with
• communities
• Open Source Approved License® registry project underway with help of intern, Giulia Dellanoce
• Why the European Commission must consult the Open Source communities
  2023 State of Open Source Report: key findings and analysis
• Notable Open Source news

Results of 2023 elections of OSI board of directors

Congratulations to the returning directors Aeva Black, and Catharina Maracke, and the newly elected director Anne-Marie Scott.

Anne-Marie Scott has been confirmed and joins as a director elected by the Affiliate organizations. She’ll take the seat that was occupied by Hong-Phuc Dang who resigned in June 2022. Aeva Black and Catharina Maracke collected the votes of the Individual members.

Containers can be safer with Open Source

Container adoption is soaring, thanks to Open Source. The majority of projects and tools for container management in the cloud-native ecosystem are Open Source; one example is SlimToolkit, a tool supported by Slim.AI. SlimToolkit addresses one of the most critical issues in the cloud-native ecosystem today: container security. Read more from OSI Maintainer Sponsor Slim.AI.

April 4 OSI License Clinic Washington DC a Success!

With a ten year pause since the last License Clinic, OSI is now on track to deliver License Clinics for public service employees in support of their role in adoption and use of Open Source within their agencies. In the US, recent executive orders and the new National Cybersecurity Plan – released just ahead of the clinic – has raised the bar for engagement with free and Open Source software communities by agencies.

Three current OSI board directors and two board directors emeritus along with seasoned government practitioners led a full-day interactive workshop covering Licensing 201 AI/ML, SBOM, and Alternative Licenses.  Attendees represented a wide range of DC area interests; civilian and military, the White House, Non-governmental agencies and Nonprofits, the legal community as well as contractors supporting agencies OSS projects  Plans are underway now for the 2024 clinic.  Watch this space for the date, plus announcement of publication of Clinic proceedings early this summer.

Diving in to Open Source supply chain; connecting and collaborating with communities

It has been about one month since ClearlyDefined Community Manager Nick Vidal joined the Open Source Initiative, and he’s been busy learning about ClearlyDefined and how it fits into the Open Source supply chain compliance and security ecosystem. This is an exciting area that has a major impact not just in the tech sector, but on society as a whole, as Open Source has become pervasive.

Open Source Approved License® registry project underway with help of intern, Giulia Dellanoce

One of the main drivers for the recent OSI website upgrade was to unify OSI-approved licenses with all related metadata to a consistent, reliable and easy-to-access format. From there we can incorporate the outcome of the recommendations coming out of the License Review Working Group. What’s really exciting is we have hired an intern, Giulia Dellanoce, to get this important project underway!

Also join us in thanking Slim.AI, who’s donation to OSI is supporting this internship.

Why the European Commission must consult the Open Source communities

A crucial problem with the Impact Assessment of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is that no Open Source communities or community fiduciaries were consulted as stakeholders. The lack of consultation with the Open Source communities would explain the possible origin of a serious defect in terminology. Standards & EU Policy Director, Simon Phipps, explains more in his latest blog.

2023 State of Open Source Report: key findings and analysis

Executive Director Stefano Maffulli joined Javier Perez on a webinar reviewing the results of the 2023 State of Open Source survey, a collaborative effort between OpenLogic by Perforce and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Open Source users from all eight global regions, working in 20+ industries in organizations of all sizes were anonymously surveyed. The resulting report is about 60 pages of great content and data on all things Open Source. The raw data of the survey has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Here are some key findings they recently discussed.

OSI in the news

Open-source tools have a large role in the production of AI. devm.io spoke with Open Source Initiative’s (OSI) Stefano Maffulli about Open Source and AI systems.

And a huge shoutout to all of our renewing sponsors!

• Bloomberg for their continued support of ClearlyDefined.

Are you interested in sponsoring or partnering with the OSI? Contact us to find out more about how your organization can promote open source development, communities and software

Image by kiquebg from pixabay via Canva.com

Salesforce is a cloud-based software company with applications that help businesses manage customers in every step of the customer journey, from lead to loyalty. The service Salesforce provides its customers is profoundly based on Open Source software from many sources. In 2014, Salesforce donated Open Source Phoenix to Apache (now called Apache Phoenix), and continues to contribute to thousands of Open Source projects every year.

We asked Alyssa Gravelle, Senior Program Manager, Open Source to share the organization’s intrinsic ties to Open Source, its reasons for supporting the Open Source Initiative, and its hopes for the Open Source movement. Here’s what she said:

Open Source has been part of Salesforce from the beginning. As an organization, we know that Open Source drives our industry forward, kick-starts new careers and builds trust in the products we create. From using projects, making improvements and sharing our most impactful innovations with the Open Source community, we get to leave it better than we found it.

We encourage all of our employees to contribute to and use Open Source, from key technologies powering our innovation to community projects that make our world a better place. Open Source is becoming a larger part of our culture at Salesforce. In fact, employees can participate in Open Source projects as a part of our Volunteer Time Off benefit. Volunteering is a core value of the company, and our employees can log up to 56 volunteer hours contributing, as long as the project is philanthropic in nature and is not part of their day job. In 2023, our goal is to log 750 volunteer hours. We have employees volunteering to projects such as Refuge Restrooms, aXe, and Ushahidi, in addition to projects owned by foundations such as the CNCF.

Open Source is also becoming a larger part of our products at Salesforce. It was always core to various initiatives and products, such as Heroku and Mulesoft, and it is now built into Hyperforce and Dataweave. Investing more than ever in Open Source, Salesforce now has a dedicated Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) with support from legal and security, and the OSS Core team, a group of volunteers passionate about Open Source, work to drive the success of Open Source at Salesforce.

There are several other Open Source initiatives Salesforce is focused on:

• Lightning Web Components: Lightning web components are custom HTML elements built using HTML and modern JavaScript released in 2019 with dedicated teams still working on it.

• Dataweave CLI: The DataWeave Language is a simple, powerful tool used to query and transform data inside of Mulesoft. DataWeave supports a variety of transformations: simple one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-one mappings from an assortment of data structures, and can complete more elaborate mappings including normalization, grouping, joins, partitioning, pivoting and filtering.

• Buildpacks: Initially used primarily with Heroku, we are proud of the impactful contribution we’ve made with Cloud Native Buildpacks. We are maintainers of the Buildpacks project, which takes application source code and produces a runnable OCI image. The project was contributed to the CNCF Sandbox in 2018 and graduated to Incubation in 2020. For most Heroku users, Buildpacks remove the worry of how to package your application for deployment, and we are expanding our use of Buildpacks internally in conjunction with our Kubernetes-based Hyperforce initiative.

• FOSS Fund: Each quarter Salesforce’s Open Source contributors nominate and vote on a project that is essential to our work at Salesforce. The winning project is awarded $10,000. We started at the beginning of 2020 and have 11 projects we have funded so far. We will continue to support one project per quarter in 2023.
• Internal Open Source Conference: We hosted our second internal Open Source Conference in 2022, with global presentations in both the AMER and APAC time zones. Salesforce will continue to grow this as we focus on providing tools and information to the Open Source community.

Why Salesforce Sponsors OSI

We recognize two main issues facing the Open Source community today. The first is the attempted redefinition and/or dilution of what an Open Source license means. The second is the complexity of tracking and fixing Open Source security related problems.

OSI-certified licenses are known and trusted commodities. As the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), OSI takes a hard stance against Open Source licenses that don’t abide by the OSD, guaranteeing that the rights and freedoms associated with Open Source are maintained and honored. At Salesforce, we recognize the importance of this in keeping Open Source as entrenched and successful as it is. We consider OSI a key partner in the Open Source ecosystem as an impartial “safe-space” for Open Source engagement, education and compliance. OSI’s focus on the security and maintenance of Open Source projects, and its insights and guidance are invaluable.

In the coming year, it would be useful for OSI to extend its focus on the “rank and file” membership; the individual contributor in Open Source. Companies and organizations have plenty of foundations which empower their voices and reach, but very, very few Open Source foundations focus on the community of people, which serve as the life-blood and catalysts for innovative Open Source. In the words of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax: “Who speaks for the trees?” OSI should be one of the loudest and clearest voices for the individual community.