OSI’s Questionable Election Returns Questionable Results

Garbage in, garbage out. Open Source Initiative is starting to look like an organization that’s turning its back on its founding principles.

Results are in, and like ’em or not — or think they’re fair and proper or not — OSI’s board is sticking to its guns and standing by the results of its recent board election.

In fact, from reading the official announcement on OSI’s website, you wouldn’t even know there had been any irregularities at all in this election. There were definitely two — three, by the way I count them.

“The Open Source Initiative board of directors met to validate the results of the polls, confirmed Carlo Piana as director and welcomed Ruth Suehle, recommended by Affiliates, and McCoy Smith recommended by Individual supporters, as new directors.”

What this means is that Piana was reelected; Ruth Suehle, who became president of the Apache Software Foundation in November, takes an affiliate seat; and McCoy Smith, a Portland, Oregon-based IP lawyer, patent prosecutor, and litigator, is now the holder of an individual member seat.

I’m assuming that the board’s validation was unanimous. If not, we’ll never know because OSI board members these days have to sign an oath to publicly support every decision the board makes, which is just the least of many reasons why the results of this election should be thrown out the window.

Election Tainted From the Start

If you’ve been reading about this particular election since I started writing about it in February, then you already know that I think that the results of this election are meaningless.

Up until now, I’ve based that opinion solely on Debian developer Luke Faraone’s name being kept off the ballot. Faraone’s self-nomination had been refused for being filed about three hours after the closing of nominations, a time that was figured in Coordinated Universal Time even though no time zone was mentioned in the rules posted on OSI’s website, nor in one of two emails that were broadcast to OSI members.

In the Pacific time zone, where Faraone lives and where OSI’s is officially located, the nomination was filed with about three hours to spare.

In spite of the fairly vocal public outcry this caused — and the fact that a similar situation a couple of years back involving polling times had been solved by merely extending polling hours — the OSI remained steadfast in their refusal to put Faraone’s name on the ballot.

“It would be unfair to the other candidates,” they said, which had everybody scratching their heads.

At the time, this was the only election irregularity that I knew about — but felt that this was certainly enough to call the entire election process into question — enough so that during an eight day period in late February and early March, I wrote about it on three separate occasions, here, here, and here.

Post-election, new irregularities have come to light that are causing me to wonder whether OSI’s membership should demand resignations from the organizations leadership — from the board of directors down to the executive director — and start all over again.

Other Issues With OSI’s Election

During the entire nominating period, and beyond that until at least March 2 which is when I wrote my last pre-election article, the OSI’s website said there was one affiliate seat up for grabs and two individual member seats. That’s what every candidate thought, pretty much up to the time voting started.

In an article published Friday, LWN’s editor Joe Brockmeier explained that turned out to not be true, which led to an eleventh hour change by OSI.

“This year, the elections were announced on January 22, by OSI head of community Nick Vidal, with nominations running through February 17 for one affiliate director and two individual directors, Brockmeier wrote (the emphasis is mine) “That was later corrected to two affiliate directors and one individual director, after nominations had closed, with an update inserted into the blog post:

“Thankfully, a candidate caught the mistake in time, and we have corrected the ballots before elections opened. To prevent similar errors in the future, we have updated our procedures to improve accuracy. We appreciate your understanding and your participation in the process!”

Even without the brouhaha around Faraone, that should obviously have been enough to convince OSI to cut bait and restart the election, going all the way back to the nominating process, because the number of seats of each type can have a huge influence on who decides to run for a seat on OSI’s board — which was something that OSI’s leadership clearly understood at the time.

Faraone — who’s preferred pronouns are they/them — had said all along that the only reason they’d been running was to oppose OSI’s Open Source AI Definition as its currently written. Since another affiliate candidate, Bradley M. Kuhn, was also running in opposition to OSAID, Faraone made the decision to run as an individual member rather than weaken the chances for OSAID opposition on the affiliate board, which was precisely why he had waited so late to file to run.

That’s all partially moot however, given that board members must publicly support a board position no matter what, which means board members can try to convince other board members to see things their way, but can’t take things to the court of public opinion.

Also, winning the election doesn’t guarantee a seat on the board, as Brockmeier pointed out in his article:

“OSI’s board makes the final determination whether to accept the results and seat the winners.”

What Should Be Done?

If I thought it would do any good, I would call for OSI’s members to walk away from the organization and create a new institution to take its place. The trouble with that is that it would introduce too much uncertainty to do anything but weaken open source. Also, any new organization that would come out of such an approach would likely be even easier for profiteering corporations to control than OSI has been.

Instead, I would recommend — with no expectation that this will ever happen — a revolt by OSI’s dues-paying members and suggest that they hold back on paying those dues while making demands on the current leadership to do away with the Trumpian loyalty agreement that forces opposition board members to publicly show support to policies they privately abhor.

After that, the board should be forced to resign, with the understanding that they can run to be a part of the board that will replace them.