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

Practical Open Source Information: New Event, CFP Open Today!

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Fri, 2021-06-04 13:04

The Open Source Initiative will be holding a half-day virtual event on September 16th to discuss Practical Open Source Information (POSI). Our audience for this series is companies, nonprofits and academic institutions that are interested in using more open source. By hearing from current practitioners, new adopters will be able to get up to speed more quickly and (hopefully) avoid some of the mistakes others have made.

Google vs Oracle: Resolved in Favor of Open Source

Submitted by administrator on Fri, 2021-04-09 07:12

We are pleased to report that Google vs. Oracle*, the landmark copyright case in the US courts about software interoperability, has been resolved favorably for open source developers. It’s been a long road to get here but it’s something the courts were always going to have to address -- is modern technology best served by the copyright maximalism that has long been promoted by the content industry or should we instead re-examine some of those assumptions to facilitate multi-company platform interoperability? The Supreme Court of the United States did not take on the full scope of the question but did provide some very helpful guidance. 

OSI Response to RMS’s reappointment to the Board of the Free Software Foundation

Submitted by administrator on Tue, 2021-03-23 10:34

To fully realize the promise of open source, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is committed to building an inclusive environment where a diverse community of contributors feel welcome. This is clearly not possible if we include those who have demonstrated a pattern of behavior that is incompatible with these goals.

OSI Election Update: Trust and Transparency in the 2021 Board Election

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Tue, 2021-03-23 08:49

We are committed to nothing less than complete restoration of trust in OSI elections, and transparency as to precisely what went wrong with our initial 2021 Board Election.

 

While our Board was initially confident we could re-run a successful election starting today, lots of people have raised quite reasonable doubts--and then some less reasonable fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) seeped into the discourse. We’re changing plans accordingly.

Re-Running Our 2021 Board Election

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Fri, 2021-03-19 14:06

We've already let our candidates, affiliate representatives and voting members know, but we also wanted to let the public know. This week we found a vulnerability in our voting processes that was exploited and had an impact on the outcome of the recent Board Election. That vulnerability has now been closed. OSI will engage an independent expert to do a forensic investigation to help us understand how this happened and put measures in place to keep it from ever happening again.

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