OSI Board Meeting Minutes, Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Quorum

Quorum reached and meeting called to order at 15:05 UTC.

Attendees

Board Members

  1. Mr. Michael Tiemann, President
  2. Mr. Karl Fogel, Director
  3. Mr. Michael Godwin, Director
  4. Mr. Harshad Gune, Director (on IRC)
  5. Dr. Fabio Kon, Director
  6. Dr. Martin Michlmayr, Secretary
  7. Mr. Andrew Oliver, Asst. Treasurer (until 16:10 UTC)
  8. Mr. Simon Phipps, Director (until 16:20 UTC)
  9. Ms. Alolita Sharma, Treasurer
  10. Dr. Tony Wasserman, Director (until 15:55 UTC)

Guests and Observers

  1. Ms. Nnenna Nwakanma, Board Observer (joined at 15:12 UTC)

Expected, but Not Present

  1. Mr. Ken Coar, Board Observer
  2. Ms. Danese Cooper, Board Observer
  3. Mr. Russell Nelson, Board Observer

Sent Regrets

  1. Mr. Jim Jagielski, Director (presenting at OR2011)
  2. Mr. Mark Radcliffe, General Counsel

Agenda

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

Minutes Review and Approval

The Board reviewed all outstanding minutes for approval (October 2, 2010; October 3, 2010; November 3, 2010; December 1, 2010; January 5, 2011; February 9, 2011; March 12, 2011; March 13, 2011; April 6, 2011; May 4, 2011).

Mr. Michlmayr moved to approve all outstanding minutes. Ms. Sharma seconded the motion. Motion passed by general consent.

Officer Reports

President's Report (Mr. Tiemann)

No report submitted.

Secretary's Report (Mr. Michlmayr)

Mr. Michlmayr reports:

  • I have processed the outstanding backlog of minutes. The following minutes have to be reviewed by the Board for approval:
    • October 2, 2010 - Face to face meeting, Paris, Day 1
    • October 3, 2010 - Face to face meeting, Paris, Day 2
    • November 3, 2010
    • December 1, 2010
    • January 5, 2011
    • February 9, 2011
    • March 12, 2011 - Face-to-face meetings, San Francisco, Day 1
    • March 13, 2011 - Face-to-face meetings, San Francisco, Day 2
    • April 6, 2011
    • May 4, 2011
  • I have posted the following minutes to opensource.org since they have already been approved by the Board:
    • September 8. 2010
    • February 27, 2010 - Face to face meetings, Raleigh, Day 1
  • I spent significant time cleaning up the internal wiki (reorganizing content, removing obsolete pages, etc) but more work is needed.

Treasurer's Report (Ms. Sharma)

Ms. Sharma provided details on OSI finances which included bank balances, funds inflow, outflow and expected expenses as of the end of May 2011.

Ms. Sharma has asked Ms. Cooper to provide the current post box key. Ms. Cooper said she would check the mailbox and mail this month.

Ms. Sharmed ask whether Mr. Oliver had mailed the signature card back to California and whether he had received the checks for RimuHosting payments for March and April 2011. Mr. Oliver noted that he had returned the signature card. Mr. Oliver could not confirm during the Board meeting whether he had received the checks for Rimu hosting because he was traveling but he promised to check later.

Mr. Michlmayr asked whether the Board could receive a copy of the 2010 tax returns. Ms. Sharma agreed to talk to the accountant.

General Counsel's Report (Mr. Radcliffe)

No report submitted.

Mr. Radcliffe has posted the definitive by-laws to the Board mailing list.

Mr. Godwin would like to spend some time with Mr. Radcliffe to brainstorm the current by-laws and the future direction of the by-laws.

Committee Reports

(Listed in alphabetical order)

Education Committee (Dr. Kon)

Mr. Kon reports that he is still looking for volunteers to help implement educational material database. He sent an email to Mr. Gune and the osi-edu-discuss mailing list. Got a few answers but only one student (with moderate skills) offering help. It looks like that Mr. Gune has got some good students willing to help, so we'll check with them and see if it works.

Mr. Kon also had a discussion with Bruno Souza about preparing an educational talk about the importance of Open Source for the Java Users Groups community. The idea is to prepare CC slides and record a video and then disseminate this to Java users groups worldwide so that they carry out these lectures locally in their regions.

Still to be done: publicizing the creation of a OSI Open Source Education Working Group.

Mr. Tiemann asked whether it would be feasible to send t-shirts to volunteers as a thank you and the Board agreed that this was a good idea.

License Committee (Mr. Fogel)

Mr. Fogel reports:

  • Synchronized with SPDX on license names, and this is now reflected in our license URLs and in the alphabetical and by-category list.
    • Martin Michlmayr then removed obsolete links to text versions of licenses (thank you, Martin!).
    • Filed a Redmine ticket about resolving the more general issue of whether or not we're providing plain text versions.
  • With SPDX, sorting out the confusion around Python license names; they seem to agree with our proposed solution.
  • Great group participation on the [email protected] list from everyone -- many askers got their questions answered. Thanks.
  • Responded to the Python Software Foundation's proposed updates to various Python-related licenses. In summary, our response is: we could approve them as-is, but we'd like to suggest some improvements, both to avoid license proliferation and to avoid certain unnecessary complexities in one of the proposed licenses. (The details are probably too complicated to go into in a board meeting, but see the thread for more).
    • TO DISCUSS: It appears that the OSI accidentally posted a different version of the CNRI Python License than the we one actually approved, according to Van Lindberg.
  • Now tracking all license-related issues in the new Redmine tracker. Please feel free to create other OSI projects in Redmine; anyone on infrastructure should be able to help you
  • NOT DONE: We'd like to get statistics on license committee participation by looking at traffic on [email protected] and [email protected], comparing to actual list membership. This may gives us a sense of how a future (membership-based) Working Group might look.

No report submitted.

Mr. Tiemann explained that the role of the chair of the Legal Affairs Committee is to strategically engage external councils in legal activities the open source community and OSI are interested in, such as:

  • GPLv3
  • License proliferation
  • Effects of patents on open source

OSI's internal legal activities are handled by the General Counsel whereas the Legal Affairs Committee is focused on external activities.

Mr. Godwin would like to talk with Mr. Tiemann more about the role about this committee in an offline conversation and Mr. Tiemann agreed.

Mr. Godwin said that the Board and the wider community is welcome to bring interesting issues to him and he will be happy to look at them and discuss them with the Legal Affairs Committee.

Membership-Governance Committee (Mr. Phipps)

Mr. Phipps reports: We're ready to formalise the Affiliate scheme, but I've not had time to breathe life into the mailing list or do the editing since our last meeting due to work and vacations. Hopefully I can get this started between now and FISL.

Policy and Economic Development Committee (Mr. Tiemann)

No report submitted.

Administrative Committees

Communications Committee (Mr. Phipps)

Mr. Phipps reports that he had some contact with the following groups:

  • FSF: they are interested in cooperating with the OSI.
  • Harmony: the Board discussed whether it would make sense to get more closely involved with project Harmony. There was agreement that this was not a good idea since the OSI Board does not have a consensus about the merits of project Harmony.
  • The Document Foundation: Mr. Phipps noted that we should invite The Document Foundation to join OSI in our new governance structure, and we should also invite the ASF and other organizations.

IT Infrastructure Committee (Mr. Oliver)

Mr. Oliver reports:

  • Aliases and mail lists have been created on projects server
  • The subdomain name will change to @opensource.org. Mr. Oliver will experiment with an alias to preserve @projects.opensource.org, but we should plan on this changing
  • How shall we inform people? My thinking is that each committee head will pass on the message. Mr. Oliver can make a template.

Mr. Fogel noted that he has installed the Redmine bug tracker at projects.opensource.org. He posted instructions on how to administer Redmine to the infrastructure list. Mr. Fogel has started using Redmine for all all licensing related issues and welcomes other Board members to use the bug tracker for their work.

New Projects / Outreach Committee (Ms. Sharma)

No report submitted.

Old Business

Review of action items

  • Mr. Michlmayr and Ms. Sharma: work on outstanding minutes and get them ready for the next board meeting. DONE.
  • Mr. Oliver: sign signature card and return it. DONE.
  • Ms. Sharma: obtain PayPal credentials from Ms. Cooper or Mr. Nelson. DONE.
  • Ms. Sharma: talk to the accountant to obtain checks. NO UPDATE.
  • Mr. Jagielski: work with Mr. Radcliffe to find out what the current by-laws are. IN PROGRESS.
  • Mr. Kon: contact Mr. Gune to see if he has students who can work on the education portal. DONE.
  • Mr. Oliver or Ms. Sharma: send list of current members of osi-edu-discuss list to Mr. Kon. DONE.
  • Mr. Fogel: work with SPDX on license name abbreviations. DONE.
  • Ms. Sharma and Mr. Jagielski: create an outreach plan. NO UPDATE.

Next face-to-face meeting

Mr. Tiemann noted that a face-to-face meeting would be beneficial if it is connected to a major advancement of the governance structure.

Mr. Tiemann asked the secretary to poll all Board members as to:

  • Agenda items
  • Accomplishments they intend to achieve during the face-to-face meeting
  • Dates to meet (in the September-November timeframe)
  • Places to meet

Ms. Sharma offered to ask the Wikimedia Foundation about availability if we decide to hold the meeting in San Francisco.

New Business

None.

Action items

  • Mr. Michlmayr: post approved minutes to web site.
  • Mr. Oliver: confirm whether he received the checks for Rimu hosting in March and April.
  • Ms. Sharma: ask accountant for copy of 2010 tax returns and post to board.
  • Mr. Godwin: talk to Mr. Tiemann about the role of the Legal Affairs Committee.
  • Mr. Michlmayr: poll board regarding face-to-face meeting.

Next Board Meeting

The next OSI BOD meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, July 6, 2011 (later moved to July 13).

Meeting adjourned at 16:25 UTC.

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.