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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.

News

Big Gains for Open Aerospace: Interview with Open Research Institute

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Tue, 2021-03-02 11:26

The Open Research Institute (ORI) is an OSI Affiliate project that works to facilitate worldwide collaboration in the development of technology. The past year has been a particularly exciting one -- achieving some groundbreaking wins for open source in aerospace. ORI’s co-founder and CEO, Michelle Thompson took some time out of her busy schedule to talk with me about their recent regulatory initiatives.  

 

DN: Can you tell us a little bit about the Open Research Institute's history and mission?

 

MT: Open Research Institute's mission is to provide a friendly, safe, and accessible place to do open source research and development for amateur radio and beyond. We have been fully operational since March 2019 and have contributed technical and regulatory work central to the mission of the international amateur radio service. This work is useful outside of the amateur community because it allows a wide variety of organizations to use open source communications technology where they would otherwise have to reinvent a wheel, or restrict the work to US persons only. 

Approved: Four New Open Source Licenses

Submitted by pchestek on Mon, 2021-03-01 08:36

As the steward of the Open Source Defintion, the Open Source Initiative has been designating licenses as "open source" for over 20 years. These licenses are the foundation of the open source software ecosystem, ensuring that everyone can use, improve, and share software. When a license is approved, it is because the OSI believes that the license fosters collaboration and sharing for the benefit of everyone who participates in the ecosystem.

New Affiliate Member Joins OSI: The TeX Users Group

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Fri, 2021-02-26 07:54
The TeX Users Group (TUG) is new to the OSI Affiliate program, but not new to the world. It's a membership-based not-for-profit that was founded in 1980 to encourage and expand the use of TeX, LaTeX, Metafont and related systems. TUG fosters innovation while maintaining the usability of these systems. TUG also supports users by hosting an annual event, maintaining a list of active local TeX user groups and publishing a regular journal called TUGboat three times a year. 
 

Modernizing Our Mission Statement

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Tue, 2021-02-09 08:20
We have reworked our mission statement. First of all, our positions have not changed but the activities that we focus on going forward will continue to extend beyond license approval. We remain stewards of the Open Source Definition (aka OSD) but we will also be looking for other ways to support, grow and maintain the open source ecosystem.
 

The Evolution of OSI as a Workplace

Submitted by Deb Nicholson on Thu, 2021-02-04 11:17
Part of our big growth year at OSI has been on the back end. One piece of that is thinking about our organization as a workplace and what it's like to work here.  We want to be a positive and healthy place to work. A place where folks can succeed without burning out, especially since we hope the next few years are likely to see us transitioning from one full-time person to two or even three full-time staffers. 
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