OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 08:10 am PT.

Attendees

Board Members

1. Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
2. Mr. Ken Coar, Director
3. Ms. Danese Cooper, Treasurer (joined at 8:12 am)
4. Mr. Harshad Gune, Director
5. Mr. Martin Michlmayr, Director
6. Mr. Russell Nelson, Director (joined at 8:29 am)
7. Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Director (joined at 8:15 am; left at 9:15 am)
8. Ms. Alolita Sharma, Secretary

Guests and Observers

1. Mr. Bdale Garbee, Board Observer (on IRC)

Expected, but Not Present

1. Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel
2. Mr. Merrill Freund (Schwartz Communications)

Sent Regrets

1. Mr. Andrew Oliver, Director
2. Mr. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Director
3. Mr. Simon Phipps, Board Observer
4. Mr. Ernest Prabhakar, Board Observer

Agenda

1. Minutes Review and Approval
2. Officer Reports
3. Committee Reports
4. Old Business
5. New Business
6. Motions for Consideration by Board

Minutes Review and Approval

Please review the following minutes as edited for public posting.

October 14, 2009 - Monthly board meeting minutes

Mr. Tiemann moves that we approve the minutes. Mr. Coar seconds. Minutes approved unanimously with general consent.

Officer Reports

President's Report:

I represented the OSI at the closing keynote session of MyGOSSCON, the Malaysian Government's Open Source conference. The Malaysian government first created a blueprint for OSS adoption back in 2002, and began making concrete progress in adopting and implementing open source starting about 2005. At this time, 90% of 724 government adminstrations are using at least one OSS application, the most popular being OpenOffice.org. They are on track to achieve 100% OSS usage by early next year.

I reviewed and passed along the materials prepared by Ms. Sharma needed to support the OSI's allegations of use for its Class 41 trademark. I have not heard back from DLA about this, but will ping them again to see whether I can provide a more certain update that progress on this front is, indeed, happening.

I reached out to Larry Rosen in hopes of advancing progress on our legal status, and I also chatted with Ms. Cooper about the appearance of our progress with respect to such status. Mr. Rosen offered to be completely cooperative in any way, and backed that up by sending us all information he had about our past accountants. Ms. Cooper explained that such information was not necessary, as the problem was with the returns we submitted using our current accountants. Ms. Cooper claims that progress is being made with assigned DLA piper resources, but Mr. Radcliffe appears to be unaware of such progress on his side, and I am similarly unaware of what specific progress (or plan) is current on our side. My requests for weekly updates to Mr. Radcliffe and Ms. Cooper have yielded none such, either in email nor, as of Monday November 9th, 2009, reports published to the board.

Traffic to opensource.org, which had been growing slightly over the past month has started to turn negative again in the past few weeks. I believe this reflects both a lack of blogging activity and also the lack of any visible initiatives undertaken by the board in the past few weeks. I have no doubt that our legal status is a de-motivator to people being more proactive about talking up and doing the work of the OSI, so I hope that we can restore ourselves to the good graces of the State of California and return to a more public status.

General Counsel's Report:

• Status (Mr. Radcliffe)

No report filed.

Secretary's Report:

Ms. Sharma reports -

• Please review the following board meeting minutes for approval.
  • October 14, 2009 - Monthly board meeting minutes, October 2009
• All approved board minutes have been posted on opensource.org.
  • September 2, 2009 - Monthly board meeting, September 2009
  • July 16, 2009 - Face to face meetings, Palo Alto
  • July 17, 2009 - Face to face meetings, Palo Alto
  • February 5, 2009 - Face to face meetings, Brussels
  • February 6, 2009 - Face to face meetings, Brussels

Treasurer's Report:

• Status (Ms. Cooper)

Ms. Cooper reports that the OSI has filed all 2008 tax filings, and recalculated amounts to State of California and the US Federal Government. Ms. Cooper also gave a current banking and financial status of the OSI. An expected donation has not been received yet so Ms. Cooper is following up. Ms. Cooper also touched base with Mr. Rosen and made further progress on helping the OSI resolve the current Pay Pal situation.

Ms. Sharma requests Ms. Cooper that all contact information for OSI lawyers and accountants be updated on the OSI wiki.

Committee Reports

License Committee

• Status (Mr. Nelson)

Mr. Nelson reports the following set of licenses are under discussion.

Title: LaTeX Project Public License
Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:839:200909:nmnpkpkdlalddebkknll
License: http://www.latex-project.org/lppl/
Comments: Legacy approval, complicated license, but on that basis, Bruce, Ernie, Chuck, John, Dag-Erling, and Michael all say yes; nobody no.
Recommend: Approval

Title: BSD license (PostgreSQL variant)
Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:874:200909:kodinndfijkmchmflood
License: In the submission
Comments: License is not generic and the disclaimer doesn't cover the PostgreSQL project submitters.
Recommend: Send it back for revision

Title: TVA Open Source License
Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:855:200909:ocbonljbkalkbhkdbaml
License:
https://naspi.tva.com/PhasorMeasurementData/Documents/TVA%20Open%20Source%20Agreement.doc
https://naspi.tva.com/PhasorMeasurementData/Documents/TVA%20Open%20Source%20Agreement%20with%20tracking%20changes%20from%20NOSA%20source.doc
https://naspi.tva.com/PhasorMeasurementData/Documents/TVA%20Open%20Source%20Agreement.txt
Comments: Not clear what their copyright status is in re 17 USC 105. Commentators had questions, but legal staff unwilling to review
Recommend: No approval without prejudice

Title: Falcon Programming Language License
Submission: http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:826:naokadpjdjicihdgloog
License: http://www.falconpl.org/index.ftd?page_id=license_1_1
Comments: Clearly OSD-compatible but ... it's the GPL with an added freedom to embed the language interpreter creating a single work without invoking the terms of the GPL. If that were it, then we could leave it there, but Giancarlo adds required attribution above and beyond that required by the GPL.
Recommend: Continue discussion

Mr. Tiemann requests again that all reports be filed ahead of the board meeting. Ms. Sharma seconds.

Mr. Tiemann moves that the board approves the licensing committee's recommendations. Mr. Coar seconds. The recommendations are approved unanimously.

Membership Committee

• Status (Mr. Oliver)

Mr. Oliver reports that the Governance committee has not yet met this month. The committee has another meeting scheduled next week. Ms. Cooper will convey the board's request to complete the membership proposal before the face to face meeting scheduled for early 2010.

Education Committee

• Status (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma reports that she has been interacting with various folks teaching the APAC POSSE camp for faculty members from Nov 9-13 in Singapore. See my blog post on Open Source Education: Professors' Open Source Camp in Singapore at http://www.opensource.org/node/475. Ms. Sharma has also been gathering feedback from the POSSE camp attendees earlier this year in Raleigh towards organizing a similar camp for teachers in India this coming spring. Also, our mailing list on open source education continues to add more members. We need to have more board members actively participating in on-line discussions and education initiatives.

Ms. Nwakanma reports that she has been working on certifications and training for Internet registration for Africa. She has been working with ICANN and FOSSFA jointly formalizing requirements. Mr. Tiemann supports the idea of Ms. Nwakanma making a proposal to the board however raises a concern that the OSI may not have enough bandwidth to monitor OSI's brand in technical certifications.

Mr. Tiemann also sees the FLOSSCC (open source competency centers) activities as being complementary to the OSI's education initiatives.

IT Infrastructure Committee

• Status (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma reports that progress has slowed down on the IT infrastructure migration project this past month. Some changes such as Mr. Greant not being available as a valuable resource as well as unavailability of board members has slowed down the setup of the new server at Rimu hosting as well as migration of mailing lists. Other blockers include access to DNS records which Mr. Nelson needs to provide to Mr. Oliver to proceed further towards better manageability of OSI mailing lists. Mr. Oliver reports that he's setup key pieces of mailman/postfix/etc on the project server but needs a DNS MX record for testing (ideally projects.opensource.org).

Action items delayed due to Mr. Greant's resignation include development of mail and DNS migration proposals as well as provisioning guidelines for opensource.org email addresses. We will reassign these tasks in next infrastructure committee meeting. Mr. Greant's efforts in helping OSI with its IT infrastructure have been invaluable and Ms. Sharma thanks him for all his efforts to manage OSI's infrastructure.

Action items: Ms. Sharma will follow-up with Mr. Nelson to get DNS access for adding subdomains. Ms. Sharma will follow-up with Brian Behlendorf to get access to current server for Mr. Michlmayr and Ms. Sharma.

Old Business

• OSI Legal Status (Mr. Tiemann)

Please refer to the President's report.

• Education resources for trademark filing (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma has completed collection of information on open source education and training done by OSI members. She has posted this information on opensource.org. The information can be reviewed at http://opensource.org/osi-open-source-education.

• PDF on website for OSI trademark and logo usage agreement (Mr. Nelson)

A PDF version of the OSI trademark and logo usage agreement needs to be posted on the OSI website (opensource.org) for the public to access and use as needed. Mr. Nelson had committed during our July sprint that a version would be posted. Is this PDF available on the website? Mr. Nelson will generate the PDF and link it to the trademark and logo usage pages on opensource.org.

• opensource.com and Red Hat follow-up (Mr. Oliver)

A discussion is in order about how the OSI can best work with Red Hat to ensure that the larger open source community is involved in an advisory capacity at opensource.com. Mr. Oliver has offered to work further on putting a strategy paper for further discussion. The discussion is scheduled for later this month.

Ms. Sharma will reach back out to Red Hat with a proposal of working together on opensource.com.

• OSI Online T-Shirt Shop (Mr. Coar)

A general discussion has been ongoing on the board list about technologies, strategies for OSI's online shop. See http://ideas.opensource.org/ticket/103 for more details. Mr. Coar had mentioned he will provide inventory numbers for the current t-shirts he has as well as work with team to put together a storefront solution. Mr. Coar states that the inventory numbers are not done yet. Mr. Phipps is working on a front-end for the online shop. Ms. Cooper is following up on the PayPal account reinstatement.

• OSI Face to Face meeting (Ms. Cooper)

Ms. Cooper suggests that the board decide soon on the next face to face meeting. Keeping funding constraints in mind, the next board meeting would be most appropriate in the US. Raleigh might be a good choice. Items such as recruiting new board members, aligning with objectives of OSCC are to be on the agenda. Mr. Tiemann will find out about face-to-face meeting support in Raleigh and report back to the board in the next meeting.

New Business

None.

Motions for consideration by the board

• Motion to approve October 14, 2009 - Monthly board meeting minutes, October 2009

Mr. Tiemann moves that the board approve the minutes. Mr. Coar seconds. Minutes approved unanimously.

• Motion to approve recommendations of license committee

Mr. Tiemann moves that the board approves the license committee's recommendations. Mr. Coar seconds. The recommendations are approved unanimously.

The next OSI BOD meeting is scheduled for December 2, 2009.

Meeting Adjourned at 09:32 AM PST.