# Open Source Initiative

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a California public benefit corporation "actively involved in Open Source community-building, education, and public advocacy to promote awareness and the importance of non-proprietary software".

## Governance

The OSI is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation, with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. It adopted a closed rather than membership-driven organizational model in order to build consensus around its definition. All authority is vested in its Board of Directors, and future boards are appointed by the current board. This governance model has hampered OSI's efforts to achieve other goals not related to the definition. Unlike other free and open-source organizations, it does not develop software, which means that volunteer efforts have been directed elsewhere.
In 2008, the OSI attempted to reform its governance, inviting fifty people onto a private mailing list, but this attempt led to no publicly available result. In 2012, the organization again tried to transition towards a membership-based structure, creating affiliate and individual memberships without any formal say over the organization. A plan for corporate membership was also announced, but has not materialized as of 2025. The motivation for adopting a membership-based structure is to obtain greater financial resources, enabling full-time positions to increase the organization's effectiveness.
In March 2021, the OSI held a board election among its members, but the results were annulled because a "vulnerability in [their] voting processes was exploited and had an impact on the outcome". Deb Nicholson, the OSI's interim general manager, committed to "engage an independent expert to do a forensic investigation". The report found that "various issues were identified that resulted in ballots being inappropriately issued or not issued in both the Individual Member and Affiliate Member elections". It was later reported that "at least one person had taken advantage of a software vulnerability and had voted twice".
In March 2023, the OSI "committed a faux pas in its [then] underway board of directors election that [had] the potential to affect the results", in that "any member who wait[ed] to vote [would have found] that the polls closed the day before". The OSI extended the voting period.
In February 2025, the OSI was declared "arbitrary and capricious" by a member whose candidacy in the board election was disqualified on the basis that they had missed an unpublished "official deadline". The California-based organization attempted "to retroactively define all of these processes as being governed by UTC", depriving several candidates the opportunity to participate in the process. While it was reported that one candidate considered this unfair, the OSI's chairperson argued that "extending the deadline would be unfair to the other candidates", which was deemed "not very nice, nor very community spirited, nor is it taking responsibility for one’s mistakes".

## Open Source Definition

The Open Source Definition is the most widely accepted standard for open-source software. Providing access to the source code is not enough for software to be considered "open-source": it must also allow modification and redistribution under the same terms and all uses, including commercial use. The Open Source Definition requires that ten criteria be met for a license to be approved. It allows both copyleft—where redistribution and derivative works must be released under a free license—and permissive licenses—where derivative works can be released under any license. Software licenses covered by the Open Source Definition also meet the Free Software Definition and vice versa. Both the Free Software Foundation and the OSI share the goal of supporting free and open-source software.

### License approval process

The OSI approves certain licenses as compatible with the definition, and maintains a list of compliant licenses. New licenses have to submit a formal proposal explaining the rationale for the license, comparison with existing approved licenses, and any legal analysis. The proposal is discussed on the OSI mailing list for at least 30 days before being brought to a vote and approved or rejected by the OSI board. Although the OSI has made an effort to have a transparent process, the approval process has been a source of controversy.
Seven approved licenses are particularly recommended by the OSI as "popular, widely used, or having strong communities":
* Apache License 2.0
* BSD 3-Clause and BSD 2-Clause Licenses
* All versions of the GPL
* All versions of the LGPL
* MIT License
* Mozilla Public License 2.0
* Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)
* Eclipse Public License version 2.0

## Open Source AI Definition

In 2022, OSI began work on an Open Source AI Definition (OSAID), inviting select researchers and corporate representatives to make a draft. Even companies with accessible code often do not release the data set used to train the model and impose usage restrictions on what can be done with the trained model. Maffulli said a new definition was necessary because artificial intelligence "is different from regular software and forces all stakeholders to review how the Open Source principles apply to this space". Open Source Definition author Bruce Perens was skeptical about the need to address AI separately, claiming it is going to confuse the open source brand because the existing definition applies to all software.
The release of the Open Source Artificial Intelligence Definition (OSAID), version 1.0 in November, 2024 opened up new disagreements and considerable ill-feeling, further stirring up ongoing tensions. OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock said it was a mistake as the market will shift and change, noting that it undermines longevity by creating confusion and dispersing resources. She also referred to the absence of dedicated definitions for mobile and cloud, which would have been "very inappropriate". There were questions about whether such a definition is useful for policymakers, researchers, and technologists.

## History

As a campaign of sorts, "open source" was launched in 1998 by Christine Peterson, Jon "maddog" Hall, Larry Augustin, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, and others.
The group adopted the Open Source Definition for open-source software, based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines. They also established the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as a steward organization for the movement. However, they were unsuccessful in their attempt to secure a trademark for 'open source' to control the use of the term. In 2008, in an apparent effort to reform governance of the organization, the OSI Board invited 50 individuals to join a "Charter Members" group; by 26 July 2008, 42 of the original invitees had accepted the invitations. The full membership of the Charter Members has never been publicly revealed, and the Charter Members group communicated by way of a closed-subscription mailing list, "osi-discuss", with non-public archives.
In 2012, under the leadership of OSI director and then-president Simon Phipps, the OSI began transitioning towards a membership-based governance structure. The OSI initiated an Affiliate Membership program for "government-recognized non-profit charitable and not-for-profit industry associations and academic institutions anywhere in the world". Subsequently, the OSI announced an Individual Membership program and listed a number of Corporate Sponsors.
On November 8, 2013, OSI appointed Patrick Masson as its general manager. From August 2020 to September 2021, Deb Nicholson was the interim general manager. Under the direction of Deborah Nicholson, the interim manager, the voting and election was held with results and then halted and set for re-election due to vulnerabilities in the election process. "This week we found a vulnerability in our voting processes that was exploited and had an impact on the outcome of the recent Board Election." No election results or further updates are posted as of June 2021.
In November 2020 the board of directors announced a search for an executive director which was concluded in September 2021 with the appointment of Stefano Maffulli. At the same time, the role of president of the board was abandoned in favor of chair of the board.

## Controversy

In October 2009, the OSI lost its corporate status, having been suspended by the state of California for failing to submit paperwork on time.
In January 2020, founder Bruce Perens left OSI over controversy regarding a new license (the Cryptographic Autonomy License), which had been proposed for the OSI's approval. Later, in August 2020, Perens elaborated on his concerns: "We created a tower of babel of licenses. We did not design-in license compliance, and we have a tremendous noncompliance problem that isn't getting better. We can't afford to sue our copyright infringers."
Eric S. Raymond, another co-founder of the OSI, was later banned from the OSI mailing list in March 2020. He had claimed "OSI has been suborned and is betraying its founding commitment to freedom" the month prior, taking exception to proposed licensing changes that "would be a direct and egregious violation of OSI's charter and [his] intentions in founding OSI".
The October 2024 release of the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) was controversial, opening up new disagreements and considerable ill-feeling.