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.
Our Individual seat winners are Aeva Black and Catharina Maracke -- both new to the OSI Board. We are also welcoming Hong Phuc Dang back and are excited to have Thierry Carrez join us as a new Affiliate Board Member. Thank you to all our members and affiliates for your discussions, your participation and your votes.
We recently brought on Betsy Waliszewski to serve as our Director of Sustainability. She’s in charge of our fundraising efforts and sharpening up our communications with all the many stakeholders in the open source community and we couldn’t be more excited.
Betsy comes to us after many years of involvement with several different parts of the open source community. Some of you may have met her during her sixteen years with O’Reilly Media, the longtime organizational host of the recently, (sadly) discontinued OSCON. Others of you may have met Betsy during her recent six year stint at the Python Software Foundation where she served as their very successful Sponsorship Coordinator and Administrator.
Everyone’s been talking about GitHub’s recently announced Copilot tool, a new AI-powered code assistant. So, we started by asking ourselves, “Is this tool a net positive for the open source community?”
The answer is “Maybe” but with some caveats. In addition to their significant community of pragmatic collaborators (many of whom fail to specify any license let alone an open source one), GitHub has become in many ways the default place where open source communities work together. That unique position comes with some inherent responsibility.
Effective self-governance is the bedrock of a healthy open source community.
Our CFP for Practical Open Source Information (POSI) has been open for about a month and we’re planning a unique, half-day event targeting organizations and individuals often left out in community programming that are looking for ‘nuts-and-bolts’ information about what using open source means in practice, from speakers with extensive experience in the field.
This is the first such event we’ve planned, so to get the word out, we’ve been reaching out directly to a wide array of open source community members of all stripes -- strategists, activists, lawyers, developers -- to spread the word about our Call for Speakers, which closed on July 15th, 8:00 EDT. We want this event to be a place where folks can find an accessible entry point into open source practices, learning from community members about best practices, common mistakes, and answers to topics as deceptively simple as choosing the right license for a project, so if that’s something you know about, we want to hear from you!
