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How do you get engineering ready for open source? How do you help your lawyers learn about the current legal thinking around open source?
September 16 - 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM EDT

News

Practical Open Source Information -- Event Schedule Now Available!

Submitted by vbejdo on Thu, 2021-08-12 13:48

On September 16th, 2021, the Open Source Initiative will be hosting a free, virtual half-day event on Practical Open Source Information. Geared towards open source developers, scholars, lawyers and managers interested in learning about open source in practice, this unique event will feature speakers with extensive experience in the field -- with a focus towards new adopters and those looking to deepen their open source participation.

 

We’d like to thank everyone in the community for their support of this new event -- especially those in the community who contributed by submitting one of the many, high-quality submissions we reviewed in putting together our line-up! We are also pleased to share the schedule today -- it includes many sessions we think you can’t miss!

OSI’s 2021 Board Election is Concluded

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Wed, 2021-08-11 11:30

Our Individual seat winners are Aeva Black and Catharina Maracke -- both new to the OSI Board. We are also welcoming Hong Phuc Dang back and are excited to have Thierry Carrez join us as a new Affiliate Board Member. Thank you to all our members and affiliates for your discussions, your participation and your votes. 

Welcoming Betsy to OSI's Team

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Tue, 2021-08-10 08:20

We recently brought on Betsy Waliszewski to serve as our Director of Sustainability. She’s in charge of our fundraising efforts and sharpening up our communications with all the many stakeholders in the open source community and we couldn’t be more excited.

 

Betsy comes to us after many years of involvement with several different parts of the open source community. Some of you may have met her during her sixteen years with O’Reilly Media, the longtime organizational host of the recently, (sadly) discontinued OSCON. Others of you may have met Betsy during her recent six year stint at the Python Software Foundation where she served as their very successful Sponsorship Coordinator and Administrator. 

What does Copilot Mean for Open Source?

Submitted by administrator on Tue, 2021-07-20 07:15

Everyone’s been talking about GitHub’s recently announced Copilot tool, a new AI-powered code assistant. So, we started by asking ourselves, “Is this tool a net positive for the open source community?”

 

The answer is “Maybe” but with some caveats. In addition to their significant community of pragmatic collaborators (many of whom fail to specify any license let alone an open source one), GitHub has become in many ways the default place where open source communities work together. That unique position comes with some inherent responsibility. 

 

Read more news from the OSI

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.