Open Source Initiative

On April 20th, 2010, a methane gas explosion ripped apart the operational oil rig "Deepwater Horizon" in the Gulf of Mexico. This accident has become a catastrophe - the largest oil spill in US history. It has damaged the entire ecosystem of life in the Gulf. The ocean waters and shorelines of Gulf states all the way to Florida and the Mississippi river delta continue to be ravaged by the gushing oil. The spill is affecting millions of people, marine life and wildlife.

Those of us who follow the growth of open source in the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) know that both Brazil and India are leveraging open source at a rapid pace towards economic development.

India

Earlier this month, the OSI board held elections for the organization's committees. Board members interested in working on OSI initiatives such as membership, education, policy and economic development, outreach submitted their candidacy to the board. Based on the slate of candidates, the board voted the following chairpersons to lead each OSI initiative for the next year.

Open Source Software has come a long way in the last decade. It has gone from being bleeding edge to becoming mainstream. Every aspect of computing, from the operating system to web applications, has examples of open source software.

As the open source ecosystem grows, the need for talented developers, collaborators and open source experts has burgeoned. Increasingly, Universities want to incorporate the teaching of open source technologies, techniques and business models into their curricula to meet this growth.

Today is Document Freedom Day. It is a day marked around the world for document liberation. It also highlights the importance of using open standards and open data formats for document interchange between everyone who has information to share - between people, schools, businesses and governments.

Progress is being made.

The OSI board elections were held earlier this month and the board voted in a new slate of directors starting April 1st, 2010. I would like to welcome our three new board members - Dr. Tony Wasserman of Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley campus, Dr. Fabio Kon of University of São Paulo, Brazil and Mr. Simon Phipps, an Open Source expert and prolific blogger.

Professors' Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), a training bootcamp targeted for faculty members of technical universities in Asia is being organized from November 9-13, 2009 at Nanyang Polytechnic in Singapore. Faculty members from Singapore, Malaysia, China, India are expected to participate.

The first camp was held in Raleigh, North Carolina earlier this year in July.

The OSI board's annual nominations and elections were held on April 1, 2009.

Highlights of this process included:

1. New Board Membership:
The board seat vacated by Mr. Bruno Souza was filled by Mr. Andrew Oliver, who has been a board observer for the last year.
2. Amendment to OSI's By-laws:

Transparency is key in enabling people to participate in the creation of wealth and well-being in society. In the past decade, free and open source software (FOSS) has become one of the major catalysts in increasing transparency by lowering the barrier to access the best software technologies. Software Freedom Day (SFD) celebrates this important role of FOSS in making this change happen globally.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. And it will be participating at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland this July 23-25, 2008. Meet OSI's team and listen to what OSI speakers have to say at the following OSCON sessions.

See you there!