Posted on March 19, 2012 by Simon Phipps
The OSI Board held a meeting on Friday to fill three vacancies on the Board. This was the first time we have had Affiliate Members, so we decided to ask them to nominate candidates to fill some of the vacancies. They came up with some great candidates, and we voted to have Eclipse’s Mike Milinkovic and Mozilla’s nominee Luis Villa join the board, along with government open source community advocate Deb Bryant. I know and greatly respect all three and I’m delighted to have their collective wisdom and ability on the new Board to help progress the steady shift over to member-based governance.
I will be at the FLOSSUK Spring 2012 conference on Wednesday and Thursday, and speaking on Thursday morning about the changes we’re working through at OSI. If you’ll be there in Edinburgh, come and find me at the Open Rights Group table where I’ll also help you sign up for ORG membership! Alternatively, come to London next Saturday for ORGCon and I’ll see you there instead.
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Filed under: OSI | Comments Off on ☆ New OSI Directors
Posted on February 6, 2012 by Simon Phipps
OSI is changing, and you can help! I spoke at FOSDEM in Brussels on Saturday, on behalf of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) where I serve as a director. My noon keynote covered a little of the rationale behind OSI, a quick synopsis of its last decade and then announcements about the work we’re doing to make OSI strong and relevant for a new decade. Read all about it at ComputerWorldUK or at the OSI web site.
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Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, OSI | Tagged: FOSDEM, open source initiative | Comments Off on ☝ A New OSI For A New Decade
Posted on February 5, 2012 by Simon Phipps
As I explained at FOSDEM (blog post coming!), the Open Source Initiative is switching to a member-led governance. For that, it will need members. The OSI Board would be very grateful if you would complete the totally anonymous survey which will help us understand what attributes you would like from OSI membership in the future. Thanks for your help!
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Filed under: OSI | Comments Off on ☆ Help OSI Transform
Posted on January 26, 2012 by Simon Phipps
I was interviewed about my upcoming FOSDEM keynote and gave this concise summary of the background to the changes I’m working on with the Board of the Open Source Initiative.
Why exactly did OSI decide to reorganize its governance from a board-only organization into a member-based structure? How will this new governance allow OSI to address its mission better?
As you’ll read at its website, “the Open Source Initiative is a non-profit corporation with global scope formed in 1998 to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community.” Despite the breadth of that mission, it has focussed almost exclusively on approval of licenses as compliant with the Open Source Definition. The Board felt that it was time to return to that initial mission and work on the broader goals too.
We hope that as a consequence of the switch to a member organisation, OSI will be able to educate, advocate and build bridges as well as continuing as a “standards body for licenses”. Our success opposing CPTN’s attempt to buy Novell’s patents (among other things we did in 2011) has given a hint of the force that could be unleashed for software freedom by having a neutral and uniting venue for education and advocacy.
Come along at noon on February 4th for more.
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Filed under: OSI | Tagged: FOSDEM | Comments Off on ☆ OSI Reform at FOSDEM
Posted on January 18, 2012 by Simon Phipps
I was pleased to be able to send OSI’s sign-on to the civil society letter protesting the bad laws being considered by the US legislature at present. You can read more about it on my OSI blog.
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Filed under: OSI | Tagged: OSI | 2 Comments »
Posted on January 7, 2012 by Simon Phipps
I’m pleased to say I’ll be delivering a short keynote at FOSDEM on February 4th at noon, explaining the new governance plans for the Open Source Initiative and announcing news of progress on the first steps of implementing them. Many thanks to the Programme Committee for their flexibility in arranging this.
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Filed under: OSI | Comments Off on ✈ OSI At FOSDEM
Posted on March 17, 2011 by Simon Phipps
You’ll recall about this time last year I was honoured to join the OSI Board and expressed hopes OSI could move towards representative governance. Well, I spent the weekend in San Francisco at an OSI Board face-to-face meeting (kindly hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation) where we finally agreed to move towards representative governance and also elected a stellar group of new Directors.
Read about it on ComputerWorldUK or the OSI Board Blog.
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Filed under: Governance, OSI | 1 Comment »
Posted on December 29, 2010 by Simon Phipps
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) Board of Directors announced today that it has taken the unprecedented step of referring the proposed sale of Novell’s patents to the CPTN consortium (led by Microsoft and allegedly including EMC, Apple and Oracle – unlikely bedfellows) to the German competition authorities.
Continue reading over at ComputerWorldUK…
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Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, OSI, Patents | Tagged: Microsoft, Novell | Comments Off on ☝ OSI Refers Novell Transaction To Competition Authorities
Posted on June 14, 2010 by Simon Phipps
OSI was formed in 1998 to solve a pressing problem. The founders embraced the ideals of software freedom, but saw that businesses – being non-persons – lacked any way to embrace a philosophical principle. To advance software freedom, it needed to be pragmatically “projected” onto the surface of the computer industry of 1998, creating rules that could be followed without demanding ideological “purity”. The result was a focus on a certain kind of advocacy, plus an enormously valuable effort to analyse, categorise and selectively endorse copyright licenses. OSI was the pragmatic projection of software freedom onto the computer industry of 1998.
But in 2010, the industry has changed. It’s due in no small part to the effects of software freedom on technology and innovation, with the pragmatic liberties it guarantees seeding today’s key trends. It’s also in part due to the attempted corruption of open standards and the policies that rely on them, which has allowed proprietary software an undeserved ascendancy. So while new businesses are able to be formed with philosophical and ethical principles embedded in their DNA, existing ones still can’t “embrace software freedom” since that’s a capability only of intelligent individuals.
So it’s time for a revamp. Read more on my ComputerWorldUK blog or at OSI
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Filed under: OSI | Tagged: Governance | Comments Off on ✍ Your Chance To Reform OSI
Posted on March 25, 2010 by Simon Phipps
§ The Open Source Initiative Board has added OSI to the list of organizations asking that the BBC not be allowed to add digital restriction measures to digital broadcasts in the United Kingdom. The BBC’s request to do so is being reviewed by the UK regulator, OfCOM, and OSI is supporting the position statement from the UK’s Open Rights Group and encouraging others to do likewise.
Read more…
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Filed under: DRM, OSI | Tagged: BBC, DRM, ORG, OSI | Comments Off on ✍ OSI Opposes BBC DRM
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