As OSI attempts to do damage control on social media without admitting that it made a mistake that needs to be rectified, more evidence surfaces indicating that the organization might be trying to change facts after the fact.
Open Source Initiative, in its apparent attempts to control the narrative about issues regarding its upcoming board election, has been making numerous posts on social media to show that it’s hands are clean — which is not at argument here — and that they absolutely can’t relent and put Faraone on the ballot because it wouldn’t be fair to the other candidates. Exactly why is wouldn’t be fair is anybody’s guess.
In case you’re just tuning in, on Sunday we reported that Debian dev Luke Faraone filed to self-nominate for a board seat, which was turned-down by OSI because, according to them, he had filed after the announced UTC time zone deadline. Faraone cried fowl, that UTC was nowhere mentioned in online instructions, and the next day OSI said that’s because they mentioned UTC in an email that was “sent to all dues paying members” — even though I’m a dues paying member and I didn’t receive it, and it’s highly possible that others deleted the email without opening it.
OSI also said that anybody who looked online would’ve seen instructions on its website. The trouble is, those instructions weren’t there from the beginning; they were added later.
This morning on Mastodon, Michael Downey, once upon a time director and treasurer for the Gnome Foundation, and these days involved with Open Source Programs at the United Nations Development Programme, posted a comparison of two versions of the same page from OSI website as they are found on the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine. Guess what? The two don’t match at one key place.
On the first screenshot of the page as it looked on January 23, 2025, the caption to a graphic depicting the election timeline reads: “2025 elections timeline.” On the screenshot of the same page as it appeared on Monday February 24, the caption reads: “2025 elections timeline. Precise deadlines are communicated via email.” The email with the time identified as being “UTC” that I’ve seen — but again, didn’t receive — is dated February 15. It would be interesting to know whether the website wording was changed before or after that date.
Again, it shouldn’t matter since OSI has admitted that the expiration timezone wasn’t listed online until after Faraone’s complaint. I know that if I were looking for information on when I needed to file by, I would be looking for it on an organization’s website and not seeing if I could find an email somewhere in my inbox.
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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