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.
In January, the License-Review mailing list discussed the Mulan PSL V2, the Cryptographic Autonomy License (Beta 4), the resolution of the Vaccine License, the BSD-1-Clause [Legacy], and the resolution of the CasperLabs Open Source License (COSL).
In January, the License-Discuss mailing list discussed Dual Licensing, copyrights on APIs, the decision process regarding license review submissions, AGPL evaluation and real world license testing, and the ZFS kernel code on Linux.
Each year the Open Source Initiative relies on the dedicated contributions of individual open source developers and advocates, OSI members, and corporate sponsors. This year, with the global pandemic now affecting so many communities, funding priorities have rightly changed: new initiatives that need dedicated support have emerged, yet many fundamental organizations still need continued support to deliver core services.
In December, the License-Review mailing list went over the ESA Permissive PL v2.3, the Mulan Permissive Software License v1 and v2, the LGPL-2+-KDE (Legacy), the Cryptographic Autonomy License (Beta 4), the CasperLabs Open Source License (COSL), the BSD-1-Clause (Legacy), and the MIT-0 license.
In December, the License-Discuss mailing list discusseed the relevance of FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) in the context of mobile communication standards, and combining LGPL and MIT licenses under a single LGPL-licensed release.
