To promote and protect open source software and communities...

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.

News

Facebook’s Visdom Project is now Open Source and Transitioned to OSI Affiliate FOSSASIA

Submitted by hpdang on Wed, 2021-01-06 08:58

OSI Affiliate FOSSASIA welcomes the Visdom data visualization project. The project has been developed at Facebook AI Research since 2017. As part of the transition from Facebook to FOSSASIA Visdom has been relicensed under an OSI approved license - the Apache License 2.0 as fully Open Source. This is a fantastic win for the FOSS community. Visdom is now available on the FOSSASIA GitHub.

Visdom is a flexible tool for creating, organizing, and sharing visualizations of live, rich data. It aims to facilitate visualization of (remote) data with an emphasis on supporting scientific experimentation. It supports PyTorch and Numpy. The project was created by Allan Jabri and Laurens van der Maaten at Facebook, and further developed under the leadership of Jack Urbanek. To date, 90 developers from around the world have contributed to the project with over 3000 projects depending on Visdom. 

Hong Phuc Dang, OSI vice president and FOSSASIA founder says: 

I am very happy about Facebook’s decision to license Visdom as Open Source and to transition it to FOSSASIA. We will continue the development of Visdom in cooperation with the developer and user community. We already discussed lots of ideas to move forward on an exciting roadmap with the core team and adding it to FOSSASIA’s Pocket Science Lab applications. We are looking forward to the input and involvement of the community to bring the project to the next level.

Special thanks to the Visdom development team and Joe Spisak whose role was essential in making this transition happen as well as to Mario Behling for leading the transition team at FOSSASIA.

More details about the next steps of the project are available on FOSSASIA’s blog here.

Released: Report on Our Member Survey

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Tue, 2020-12-01 07:37

This year, OSI Board member Elana Hashman began a project to survey OSI's stakeholders. This was the first time in our history that we have formally surveyed people in our community. Some of the results were surprising and some were expected, but on the whole, the participants we spoke with want to see OSI do "more." Let's take a look at some of the highlights.

OSI Seeks to Hire Executive Director

Submitted by Josh Simmons on Thu, 2020-11-19 12:35

It is with great pride and excitement that I announce that OSI, as of today, is embarking on a search for an Executive Director.

This is the culmination of many years of work and dedication on the part of countless individuals, and should be taken as a sign that OSI is maturing as an organization. We are following in the footsteps of many organizations that have come before us: nonprofits often start as a scrappy band of volunteers, which then hire staff for day-to-day operations, and eventually the staff are empowered to lead the organization.

The .NET Foundation Joins the Open Source Initiative's Affiliate Program

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Tue, 2020-10-20 08:21

PALO ALTO, Calif., October 20th, 2020 -- The Open Source Initiative® (OSI), the international authority in open source licensing, is excited to announce the affiliate membership of the .NET Foundation, the world's biggest repository of .NET projects and resources. Welcoming the .NET Foundation to the OSI Affiliate program further solidifies the .NET community's commitment to open source and highlights the open source movement's continued success across many different platforms.

Read more news from the OSI