Welcome new directors

The 2022 election is over and the OSI has three new Directors Carlo Piana, Josh Berkus and Amanda Brock and one re-elected, Pamela Chestek. Please join me in congratulating them, they’re joining as the Board continues modernizing its function and role. I think we underestimate how much emotional effort goes into running for such a visible and competitive position so my gratitude goes to the candidates who didn’t get elected. Read more.

Running the elections required a lot of extra attention from all of OSI’s limited staff to make sure the process ran smoothly. Before marking the task DONE, I wrote down a few lessons learned and updated our manual. There will be a few changes next year, as expected although nothing dramatic. Hopefully we’ll get to the point where running elections comes naturally and doesn’t saturate staff’s time for almost a full quarter.

While running the elections, we’ve continued to improve our communications: traffic to our blog posts skyrocketed in March (see below for the most read ones). Our IT infrastructure is also making progress, we’ve started planning a new website and will soon announce a new skin for our blog. 

Also, we’ve finalized the plan for our 2022 event! It’s going to be called Deep Dive and will focus on Artificial Intelligence. The format is highly innovative and I can’t wait to announce it more broadly. You’re getting a juicy preview 🙂 Stay tuned for more details on opensource.org/blog

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:

  • Recent court decisions affect Open Source in two major ways
  • Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source
  • GitHub’s The ReadME Project elevates the open source community through education and mentorship
  • From the “Why we support the OSI” series: Google OSPO, Comcast and CrowdSec 
  • Video recap: Simplify Open Source License Compliance
  • OSI in the News
  • Shoutout to our new sponsors!

Recent court decisions affect Open Source in two major ways

On a positive note, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we’ve always known: that it’s false advertising to claim that software is “open source” when it’s not licensed under an open source license. Read our take on this decision.. Read more.

Unfortunately this case contains one more decision that is already raising concerns among the open source community: It may not be possible to remove additional restrictions from the AGPLv3 if they’ve been added by the original licensors. Read more.

Open source ‘protestware’ harms Open Source

The OSI condemns the attack on Ukraine by the Russian army at the direction of Vladimir Putin—but there is a new development that directly impacts the open source community, and it warrants a new commentary. The new development is that angry maintainers have started adding code to a small number of open source repositories to protest against the war. Read more.

GitHub’s The ReadME Project elevates the open source community through education and mentorship

GitHub is committed to open source and building solutions that support the open source community. With The ReadME Project, GitHub is building an editorial platform where open source maintainers and contributors can share expertise in an effort to grow the collective knowledge base and inspire everyone to become better together. Read more.

Google OSPO. Comcast and CrowdSec: Why we support the OSI

We asked OSI Sponsors Google OSPO, Comcast and CrowdSec to share their organization’s intrinsic ties to open source, reasons for supporting the Open Source Initiative, and hopes for the open source movement.

Simplify Open Source License Compliance

Marc Jones is General Counsel at CivicActions, a professional services firm providing design, technology, consulting and training services to the government. In other words, he has a lot of experience in the licensing of open source software and shared some of his top-level advice for anyone looking to open source a project. Read about what he had to say during our 2021 POSI event.

OSI in the news

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

And a huge shoutout to our sponsors

  • New Maintainer Level Sponsor – Slim.ai

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.