Under fire from several different camps for a variety of reasons, Open Source Initiative announces board candidates that, to the surprise of no one, doesn’t include Luke Faraone.
On Friday Open Source Initiative released the official roster of candidates for its upcoming board election. As has become the norm for the organization this decade, this election is already facing a major election irregularity. In the past, the organization has handled itself well in these cases. This time it’s decided to circle the wagons to defend a decision that many are saying is indefensible.
What this means is that when this election is over and done, and the votes have been tallied and logged into the record books, there’s going to be an asterisk placed somewhere amid the names and numbers to denote that self-nominated Debian developer Luke Faraone wasn’t allowed to run.
OSI claims that according the rules spelled out in an email broadcast to the organization’s membership, the nomination was filed well after the filing deadline of February 17 at 11:59 pm UTC. Faraone’s camp says that according to the rules spelled out on OSI’s website, where no time zone was mentioned, he filed three hours before deadline. Farone lives in the Pacific time zone, which is also where OSI is located.
The organization had a similar snafu in a board election in 2023, when OSI’s executive director Stefano Maffulli inadvertently sent a mass mailing that said voting would end on March 21, when the polls were actually scheduled to close a day earlier. In that case, the organization’s leadership did the right thing, and extended the vote to make sure that nobody’s vote would be made invalid due to confusion created by Maffulli’s error.
In this case, the organization firmly defended a line it drew in the sand, and refused to reconsider Farone’s nomination.
Who’s Running
Up for grabs in the upcoming election, which will be accepting votes from February 7 through February 17, are a total of three seats, one voting affiliate seat and two advisory individual seats. Only affiliate members of OSI can vote for the affiliate seat, while all dues paying members of the organization can vote in the individual election.
The full list of candidates running for the affiliate seat:
- Carlo Piana: He’s the incumbent, proposed by Open Forum Europe. According to his profile page, he’s a Milan, Italy-based lawyer practicing IT law.
- Ruth Suehle: Proposed by Apache Software Foundation, where she serves as president. Her profile page points out that she’s spoken on community building, open hardware/makers, and the history of open source.
- Nadia Jiang: Nominated by KAIYUANSHE, a non-profit open-source alliance based in China. Her profile says, “She currently leads Open Source Growth at Ant Group. Prior to this, she co-founded and served as COO of SegmentFault, the largest developer Q&A community in China.”
- Bradley M. Kuhn: Proposed by Software Freedom Conservancy where he’s the Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence. According to his profile, he “began work in the software freedom movement in 1992 — as an early adopter of Linux and contributor to Perl and other FOSS projects.”
- Norbert Preining: Proposed by TeX User Group. His bio points out he’s been “contributing to and leading a variety of projects, like TeX Live, Debian, EventYay, and is serving as officer of large societies and organizations dedicated to OSS and research.”
There are seven candidates running for the two individual seats:
- Chad Whitacre: Current employer is Sentry. Other affiliations include Open Source Pledge, Fair Source. Profile exerpt: “I got my start in Open Source in 2001. I participated in the Python web development boom of the 2000s that gave rise to Django and Flask (my own contribution was Aspen).”
- McCoy Smith: Current employer is Lex Pan Law LLC. Other affiliations include Editorial Board, American Intellectual Property Law Association Quarterly Journal. Profile excerpt: “I have been an active poster on the OSI License-Discuss and License-Approval lists for at least 15 years.”
- Casey Valk: Current employer is Nutanix Inc. Profile excerpt: “Casey has been a member of OSI for several years, most recently being a Professional Member. She was part of the diverse team who helped the OSI review models and develop the Open Source AI Definition 1.0.”
- Harish Pillay: Current employer is Straits Interactive. Other affiliations include Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. Profile excerpt: “I would want to steward OSI in areas of community engagement, finance, and general collaboration with organizations in the general area of technology policy and governance around the world.”
- Rasim Sen: Current employer is Oasis Software Technology. Other affiliations include IEEE and Women Who Code. Profile excerpt: “As OSI has introduced AI License v.1.0, I plan to closely monitor industry expectations and, if needed, prepare for minor or major updates to the license.”
- Bentley Hensel: Current employer is CivicActions. Other affiliations include EOT Archive and US Government Clients. Profile excerpt: “In my current role as Sr. Data & DevOps Engineer at CivicActions, I’ve seen firsthand how a ‘default to open’ philosophy empowers public sector and nonprofit organizations to innovate more effectively.”
- Richard Fontana: Current employer is Red Hat. Profile excerpt: “I have a long history of involvement as an expert and leader on open source legal matters … and have engaged with stakeholders in the open source community to a degree that is not typical of most lawyers involved in open source issues.”
An Organization Under Fire
Having been founded as a result of the adoption of the term “open source” and the creation of the open source definition as a way of codifying and expanding on the GPL and other free software ideas that Richard Stallman, GNU, and the Free Software Foundation had brought into popularity, OSI is one of the oldest of the organizations devoted entirely to open-source software.
Over the years it’s also established itself as the authority when it comes to defining what is and is not an open source license.
Recently, however, its place in the open source community has been questioned, as it’s been accused by some of being in bed with big business interests by some, and for forcing a US-focused agenda on the global open source community by others.
These issues have lately been magnified by the organization’s recent release of an open source definition for artificial intelligence implementations called Open Source AI Definition, or OSAID. The definition’s naysayers, which includes at least one OSI founder, Bruce Perens, say the definition isn’t open source at all.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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