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

The SSPL is Not an Open Source License

Submitted by administrator on Tue, 2021-01-19 10:41

We’ve seen that several companies have abandoned their original dedication to the open source community by switching their core products from an open source license, one approved by the Open Source Initiative, to a “fauxpen” source license. The hallmark of a fauxpen source license is that those who made the switch claim that their product continues to remain “open” under the new license, but the new license actually has taken away user rights.

 

LCA: Catch Talks by OSI Staff and Community

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Fri, 2021-01-15 13:48
Linux.conf.au (aka LCA) is a lovely community conference based in Australasia that will be entering its 22nd year in 2021. The volunteer-run event is known for getting deeply technical on topics varying from the inner workings of the Linux kernel to the inner workings of dealing with communities. This year's event takes place on January 23rd - 25th and is accessible is digital and accessible to everyone, whether you live "down under" or not.
 

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.

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