OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Quorum

Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 15:07 UTC.

Attendees

Board Members

  1. Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
  2. Mr. Karl Fogel, Director
  3. Mr. Michael Godwin, Director
  4. Mr. Jim Jagielski, Director
  5. Mr. Fabio Kon, Director
  6. Mr. Martin Michlmayr, Secretary
  7. Mr. Simon Phipps, Director (joined at 15:22 UTC)
  8. Mr. Tony Wasserman, Director

Guests and Observers

None.

Expected, but Not Present

  1. Mr. Ken Coar, Board Observer
  2. Ms. Danese Cooper, Board Observer
  3. Mr. Harshad Gune, Director
  4. Mr. Russell Nelson, Board Observer
  5. Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Board Observer
  6. Ms. Alolita Sharma, Treasurer
  7. Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel

Sent Regrets

  1. Mr. Andrew Oliver, Asst. Treasurer

Agenda

  1. Minutes Review and Approval
  2. Officer Reports
  3. Committee Reports
  4. Old Business
  5. New Business
  6. Action items
  7. Next Board Meeting

Minutes Review and Approval

The Board reviewed the minutes of the October meeting. Mr. Tiemann moved that the Board approve the minutes. Mr. Fogel seconded. Minutes approved by general consent.

Officer Reports

President's Report (Mr. Tiemann)

No report submitted.

Secretary's Report (Mr. Michlmayr)

Mr. Michlmayr reports:

  • The following minutes have to be reviewed by the Board for approval:
    • October 5, 2011
  • The following approved minutes have been posted to opensource.org:
    • September 14, 2011

Treasurer's Report (Ms. Sharma)

No report submitted.

General Counsel's Report (Mr. Radcliffe)

No report submitted.

Committee Reports

(Listed in alphabetical order)

Education Committee (Mr. Kon)

Mr. Kon reports:

  • A meeting was held with Bruno Souza to prepare slides for a lecture on open source for Java User Groups (JUGs). The idea is to explain what open source is and why JUGs should participate in the open source community. The talk will be recorded and a video will be sent to JUGs all around the world.
  • Mr. Gune's students are working on material for the educational portal.
  • The OSS'2011 academic conference was held in Brazil a few weeks ago. There was a panel on open source in education and it was decided to explore how to influence IEEE and ACM to include Open Source on their Computer Science curriculum.

Mr. Wasserman noted that he was involved with the development of the software engineering education curriculum. Back then, open source was not as widely recognized or used as it is today. Mr. Wasserman believes that a good case can be made to include open source topics in the various areas of the curriculum. For example, Linux can be included in curriculum on operating systems. Mr. Kon would like to see open source be included in the curriculum as an independent topic since open source development is quite different to traditional software engineering. Mr. Wasserman suggested that an article about this topic could be written for ACM SIGSOFT or SIGPLAN. Mr. Kon volunteered to create some material and work with Mr. Wasserman on an article.

License Committee (Mr. Fogel)

Mr. Fogel reports:

  • Re-installed Redmine on the new projects.opensource.org box, restored our licensing issues tracker data.
  • Contacted Van Lindberg at the Python Software Foundation again for latest on their proposed license changes.
  • Contacted Luis Villa at the Mozilla Foundation again for latest on their proposed license update.
  • Corresponded more with FSF and FSFE about "Open Source Software Is Commercial Software" campaign, told them we'd brainstorm a bit in our face-to-face and then start a real strategy discussion.
  • Completely revamped the FAQ, finally. Comments/suggestions welcome. (Was issue 16.) All items are now targetable, e.g., http://opensource.org/faq#commercial. Let's try to use those links when answering questions.
  • Made OSD sections targetable (e.g., http://opensource.org/docs/osd#fields-of-endeavor).
  • Responded belatedly to Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz regarding publication of the EUPL Compatibility Matrix at OSOR, and commented on it.
  • Updated EUPL-1.1 link on licenses list to link to our own EUPL-1.1 page, which in turn now links to the OSOR translations of EUPL-1.1 (as we had previously done directly from the licenses list) and also offers the EUPL compatibility matrix at OSOR.
  • Various comments are waiting on our license pages for approval. Mr. Fogel would like to recommend the following policy for comments on our license pages: If link to a translation, approve it and let it stand; if discussion, usually the right answer is to ensure the questions are addressed in the FAQ, and then replace all the comments in the discussion with a single comment referring to the relevant FAQ entry or entries. There was general agreement with this plan.
  • Would like to add an FAQ item about "Free Software" and whether it's the same as "Open Source" (answer: basically yes, and explain). There were no objections.
  • Do we have identi.ca / Twitter accounts, and any particular policy about tweeting? Would be nice to be able to tweet things like, e.g., OSOR's publication of the EUPL Compatibility Matrix and other stuff of general open source interest. There were some discussions about the Twitter handle.
  • Thanks to Andy Oliver and Patrick French for access to the new projects.o.o box. Also thanks to Martin Michlmayr for handling OSI face-to-face travel arrangements smoothly and early.

Mr. Godwin remarked that there were many activities going on in the US related to copyright that could have an impact on open source. He mentioned the PROTECT IP act as one example. Mr. Godwin will circulate some documents to the board from the Net Coalition that summarize the current situation. Unfortunately, these documents don't address the impact on open source.

Membership-Governance Committee (Mr. Phipps)

Mr. Phipps hopes to bring a list of prospective affiliates to the face-to-face meeting in San Francisco. He intends to propose a motion to accept them as affiliates and then launch the public enrollment program.

Policy and Economic Development Committee (Mr. Tiemann)

No report submitted.

Administrative Committees

Communications Committee (Mr. Phipps)

Mr. Phipps remarked that there had been no activity. He expects the Communications Committee to work on a press release about the initial set of affiliates after the OSI face-to-face meeting.

IT Infrastructure Committee (Mr. Oliver)

No report submitted.

New Projects / Outreach Committee (Ms. Sharma)

Mr. Jagielski is working on an outreach plan which he intends to present at the OSI face-to-face meeting.

Old Business

SourceForge donations

Mr. Michlmayr reported that he had heard back from SourceForge regarding donations. Their current system directly connects projects on SourceForge with PayPal, so it depends on individual projects whether they intend to donate to OSI.

Review of action items

  • Mr. Wasserman: post a report about the FLOSSCC meeting. The report will be ready for the face-to-face.
  • Mr. Fogel: follow-up with FSF/FSFE regarding "open source/free software is commercial SW" campaign. DONE.
  • Mr. Fogel: ping PSF and Mozilla regarding status of their new licenses. DONE.
  • Mr. Wasserman and Mr. Phipps: meet potential affiliates (such as LF) for informal discussion before the f2f. Mr. Wasserman will reach out to Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation.
  • Mr. Oliver: work with Ms. Sharma and Mr. Kon to get the DNS of FLOSSCC server changed. Mr. Kon will talk to Mr. Oliver about this issue.
  • Mr. Jagielski: create draft outreach plan for discussion at f2f. Pending.
  • Mr. Tiemann: write proposal regarding Open Hardware trademark.
  • Mr. Michlmayr and Ms. Sharma: create a digital repository to archive OSI documents. Mr. Michlmayr is waiting for the documents.
  • Mr. Michlmayr: contact SourceForge to find out about the status of OSI donations. DONE.

New Business

None.

Action Items

  • Mr. Kon and Mr. Wasserman: work on article on open source for ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN.
  • Mr. Godwin: circulate some documents from the Net Coalition to board.

Next Board Meeting

The next OSI BOD meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, December 7, 2011.

Meeting adjourned at 16:30 UTC.

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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.