Resources

Questions, answers, mailing lists, live chat and more: Whether you're an open source advocate who wants to spread the word about the benefits of open source, a software developer looking for tips or tools, an entrepreneur with a start-up or business leader transforming your company, we have resources to help.

FAQ

Ask the OSI

IRC (Live Chat)

You're not the first to come to us looking for answers. Look over the most common questions we get... maybe your answer is there.

Have a question about The Open Source Initiative?
Get an answer here!

Join us on IRC at Libera.Chat. The #osi channel is for user support and general discussion.

Documentation

Mailing Lists

Get Social

Almost everything is on our wiki, including work from various teams. A lot of information can be obtained there.

We have many global and regional mailing lists, for announcements, discussion, licensing and other topics. You can also read mailing lists on the web via Mailman.

You can find us on GitHub, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter.

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.