Open Source Initiative

I visited Seoul last week to represent OSI at an open source conference and to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Korea Software Copyright Committee (SOCOP). SOCOP organized a conference with the title "Free Open Source Software License Insight Conference", and the international speakers included Brett Smith of the FSF, Brendan Scott of Open Source Law, Michael Coté of RedMonk and myself. From the questions we received, it seems that there is a lot of interest in legal questions related to open source.

The Board of Directors of the OSI typically conducts two face to face meetings each year. Our first meeting in 2009 will take place this week, just before FOSDEM, one of the largest open source conference for developers. We want to use this opportunity to be more visible in Europe, and to meet open source developers, users and policy makers.

License proliferation has been a topic for discussion for quite a while now in the FOSS community and many would like to see the Open Source Initiative (OSI) fix this problem for good. In a license proliferation report, the OSI lists three problems that people generally see with license proliferation: