Celebrate 20 Years of Open Source

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is celebrating its 20th Anniversary in 2018. The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California. That same month, the OSI was founded. As a global non-profit, the OSI protects and promotes open source software, development and communities, championing 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.

News

Crowdsourcing FOSS Project Success: Clearly defined project data, a smooth path to widespread adoption.

PALO ALTO, Calif. - March 6, 2018 -- Today the Open Source Initiative® (OSI) announced its Incubator Project, ClearlyDefined, a crowdsourced project aimed at boosting the success of FOSS projects by clearly defining their status. Absences or ambiguities around licensing or known security vulnerabilities can erode confidence and limit project success. Project teams often are not aware of these concerns or do not know how to address them.

OSI Celebration at Campus Party Brazil

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) celebrated its 20th Anniversary at Campus Party Brazil 2018 during the first week of February. Campus Party Brazil is among the largest and most diverse tech events in the world. The eleventh edition of the event received a total of 120,000 attendees, of which 8000 were "campers" (participants who actually camp in tents inside this week long event). Approximately 40% of attendees were women, which is a very high mark for a tech event.

Why I want you to run for the OSI Board

The Open Source Initiative board is homogeneous, stratified across generations.

We fit across three (tech) generations of contributors to free and open source software–those who were involved in the early days of free software; those who found places in the community after open source had been established; and the group paultag humorously dubbed the GNU generation–none of us have lived in a world without the explicit concept of user freedom.