The OSI celebrates maintainer month

There are all sorts of people maintaining Open Source software, from developers to quality assurance, project managers, tech writers and June is time to celebrate them all. Whether they do this as a hobby or as a well-paid job, thank you! There are lots of initiatives around the world worth following this month. Check the schedule published by GitHub and submit your pull requests to add other events. We’ll be in Austin for the Open Source Summit (June 20-24): Are you going, too? I’d love to meet and say thanks in person!

We want to recognize the work done to improve the projects we use every day by giving them a shout out here:

  • CiviCRM, it’s the tool we use to send you this newsletter but more importantly we use it to manage individual memberships, donors and sponsors. Without CiviCRM we’d be struggling to find a substitute with as much power and flexibility.
  • Drupal, the trusty companion to CiviCRM running our website.
  • Xwiki, a workhorse that holds our board meeting notes and policies. We can do more with it and hopefully we’ll soon have the resources to do so.
  • Mailman, the traditional system to hold online, asynchronous conversations via email.

I’d like also to celebrate the newest additions to our IT infrastructure:

  • WordPress, powering the new blog and the minisite for Deep Dive: AI, our upcoming event on Open Source and artificial intelligence.
  • Plausible Analytics, which we deployed to avoid using a cookie management solution.
  • Cal.com, to simplify taking appointments with OSI’s teams (Disclosure: Cal.com is also an OSI sponsor.)

Maintainers get yelled at for free and by complete strangers. It’s a tough role. We know that feeling of being criticized by the general public. After all, the Open Source Initiative maintains the Open Source Definition and the Open Standards Requirements for the wider community, we get it.

But most of the time things just work, thanks to the dedication of thousands of people who, with different motivations, all contribute to a common pool of knowledge. 

Thank you all maintainers of Open Source, enjoy your month!

Discuss this and other topics during OSI’s informal office hours on Fridays. 

Stefano Maffulli
Executive Director, OSI

In this month’s Open Source Initiative Newsletter:

Memray project showcases why Bloomberg is an ‘Open Source first’ company

`It’s fair to say that Bloomberg and the financial services industry have been on a first-name basis for decades. Most every trader, analyst and CFO is familiar with the Bloomberg Terminal or the company’s data and news service and probably interacts with it in some way on a daily basis.
What might not be as well-known are Bloomberg’s contributions to open source software, both as a driver for its own technology and application infrastructure, as well as developing enterprise-scale tools for the broader open source community. Read more.

OSI to the European Commission: make space for patent-free standards too

One of the biggest hidden challenges facing the software and technology world is the evolving conflict between old electronics vendors and the new software-defined universe. It’s arising because of patents embedded within international standards. We think it needs fixing because it especially affects, and may be harmful to, Open Source. Read more.

OpenLogic by Perforce: Why we support OSI

We were pleased to spotlight OSI sponsor, OpenLogic by Perforce, and learn why open source is important to their organization. OpenLogic by Perforce offers technical support and services for over 450 open source packages through guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs), and provides direct access to highly experienced Enterprise Architects, professional services, and training.Open Logic by Perforce supports OSI because we believe in its mission to protect the Open Source Definition. Read more.

About the standards question in the OpenUK survey

The UK is an important contributor to global standards. Many international standards were initiated in the UK, and UK experts are significant contributors in many standards developing organizations (SDOs). But how strong is the connection to Open Source? OpenUK has added a question about Standards in its 2022 State of Open Survey. Read more.

OSI Sponsor: Why OSI, Slim.AI

Slim.AI helps developers create, build, deploy and run their cloud-native applications more efficiently and securely. The unique approach used by Slim.AI moves the focus on container optimization upstream in the DevOps lifecycle, giving developers the tools they need to author, manage and ship production-ready containers efficiently and effectively.

We asked our sponsors at Slim.AI 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 they said.

OSI in the news

In case you missed it, the OSI was featured in this article:

And a huge shoutout to all of our new sponsors

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