OSI Board Meeting Minutes, August 9, 2006

Attendees

  • Mr Michael Tiemann, President
  • Ms Danese Coope, Secretary
  • Mr Russ Nelson, Director
  • Mr Matt Asay, Director
  • Mr Ken Coar, Director
  • Mr Sanjiva Weerawarana, Director
  • Ms Laura Majerus, Legal Affairs (Observer)
  • Ms Sally Khudairi (Observer)
  • Mr Mark Radcliffe, Counsel (Observer)

Agenda

OSCON Wrap-Up

  • Those who didn't attend the Content Sprint are to review content. The SocialText site is the easier editing ground). Mr Nelson to move over remaining SocialText content to Drupal wiki on 2006-08-06. Mr Tiemann and Ms Khudairi will meet for an hour 2006-08-06 (email to follow).
  • Ms Cooper met with Open Source Developer Labs (OSDL) over dinner. She notes that they seem to be spending a lot of energy running seminars to educate Chinese developers as kernel engineers. A discussion about their (OSDL's) bid to become OSI Board of Directors observers followed and the general consensus was that the time was not ripe for implementing that.
  • Ms Majerus reported that she was not getting many comments on the License Proliferation issue. A mail has been sent to the list.
  • Queries about the state of the License Wizard were tabled. One possibility raised was to simplify or "branch" it so that simplified and complete versions were available. Inquiries about whether the Wizard was ready for viewing were made.
  • It was noted that the BOF at OSCON was not as well attended as previous BOFs, possibly due to lack of advertisement or generally bad BOF characteristics at OSCON (dinner has to be early because the restaurants close early). Mr Sameer Verma (San Francisco State University, at that time defining the logic for the Wizard project) attended, as did Ms Majerus (thanks!). Ms Cooper has done a PodCast recording for Mr Scott Mace (Wiredmuse) as a result of this meeting (which will be aired end of August). Mr Dick Hardt (Sxip) and Mr Stephen Walli (Optaros) were both @ the BOF and interested, as were Mr Brian Behlendorf (Collabnet, Apache) and Mr Geir Magnussen (Intel, Apache).

New Website

  • The new content shall be finalised at call 2006-08-06
  • Mr Nelson, Mr Weerawarana, Ms Cooper and Mr Tiemann plan another sprint at FOSS-SL (FOSS Sri Lanka).

Discussion of Modified MPL Licenses and OSI Approval:

  • It was noted that David Berlind (C/NET) is writing about whether OSI is no longer relevant in light of trend of licensees to modify MPL and not re-submit. Affected projects (that OSI knows about) include SugarCRM, SocialText, Compiere, Scalix, Zimbra, Alfresco (Mr Asay's employer). Mr Radcliffe is counsel for SugarCRM, SocialText and Compiere.
  • It was agreed to discuss with all parties what's likely to happen if a public discussion ensues. Mr Radcliffe requested that OSI not single out any one company. Mr Asay is also on the Advisory Board of SugarCRM.

Open Standards Requirement (OSR)

  • Mr Tiemann offered to be the visible "list presence" on osr-discuss, which was accepted by the board. Mr Weerawarana will respond immediately to Mr Sam Ruby's (IBM, Apache) posts and Ms Cooper will respond to Mr Stephen Walli's posts.
  • Mr Tiemann to re-engage with "Socialization" list to push for endorsements. It was noted that Mr Bruce Perens (Software in the Public Interest) wants to be back on the OSI board on this issue.
  • Discussion of public announcement expectation is planned at EuroOSCON. OSI needs to decide about: t-shirts, press releases if any, etc.

Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 10:00 PDT.


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.