Bonum Certa Men Certa

OSI President: Most or Half of the OSI's Money (Even Individual Donors' Money) Goes to a Microsoft-Led Initiative

Microsoft Initiative or Open Source Initiative? Can't be both.



Summary: The OSI has turned from advocate of "Open Source" (a disingenuous attempt to set aside Free/libre software) to advocate of Microsoft and GitHub in just 3 years (since taking Microsoft's money/bribes)

OUR regular readers may still recall that the OSI's sole member of staff left a couple of months ago, only months after one OSI co-founder quit in protest and another OSI co-founder was banned from the mailing list (for confronting a threat to the OSI's mission).



Basically, the General Manager quit without and before finding a successor and in his place they temporarily put a person who had raised money from Microsoft for two years in a row. Quite the accomplishment, eh? As we put it a few weeks ago, "The Open Source Initiative in 2020 is Purely Farcical". The money from Microsoft isn't a donation; there are strings (conditions) attached to it. No wonder the OSI's blog quickly became a Microsoft marketing tool.

"The money from Microsoft isn't a donation; there are strings (conditions) attached to it."According to the above video, the OSI receives about $20,000 a year from individual members, still about 5% of the whole (the rest is large corporations, as before), so it's effectively the same as when we last looked at it. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is so upset that we point this out, based on their own IRS filings. All they can resort to is then ad hominem attack (which is what they did; I get attacked for stating facts).

Now, as per the above admission, it's even worse than we imagined. He says that twice the budget (or most of it) goes to ClearlyDefined. It gets about half the budget (no question about it, as he'd know as a former treasurer) and it's a very big deal. The ClearlyDefined people hide their identity and hide behind CloudFlare, but it's not hard to know who they really are.

ClearlyDefined was pushed by Jeff McAffer (Microsoft) and then by Microsoft inside the OSI's board (and blog) in 2018 and in 2019. In 2018 he wrote: "The team in Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office has been contributing to this project and is a part of the community growing around the technology, curation, and upstream work. We are very excited to help develop ClearlyDefined along with many other organizations, companies, and individuals who are producing and/or consuming open source. Every day we are engaging with more and more open source teams. ClearlyDefined is crucial to understanding the nature of their code. We love the mindset and the project fits seamlessly into our engaged approach to open source."

"ClearlyDefined was pushed by Jeff McAffer (Microsoft) and then by Microsoft inside the OSI's board (and blog) in 2018 and in 2019."The OSI's press release says "ClearlyDefined community has already curated licensing data for 1,000 of the most popular projects on GitHub and in key package management ecosystems. [...] Jeff McAffer of the ClearlyDefined project team."

A Microsoft employee; we wrote about it many times before. We've always pointed out that ClearlyDefined is advocated almost solely and exclusively by Microsoft staff, people of the same group that phoned my employer in an effort to cause me trouble. They're thugs, albeit they try to disguise themselves as protectors of manners or whatever.

The above clip is a portion from around 25:30 - 29:00 of this new video. From the video's description: "Thank you to our Video Recordings Sponsor eng@salesforce!" (Also notice that this has only corporate sponsors, so OSI is basically an extension of corporations)

"Video Recordings Sponsor" (all capitalised) is Salesforce, which recently became notorious for laying off a lot of staff, but not the OSI's pawn (President).

"We've always pointed out that ClearlyDefined is advocated almost solely and exclusively by Microsoft staff, people of the same group that phoned my employer in an effort to cause me trouble."Well, that's his employer, with proprietary software to do this group chat/call. Readers must recall that this is the company whose head staff was pushing not only to oust Stallman but everyone who supported Stallman as well (collective assassination), in effect trying to kill the whole FSF. Not too long ago the Open Source Initiative (OSI) added more of Microsoft's people as well as money.

One final point: does that look like the Open Source Initiative's President uses Open Source on his desktop? Hard to tell from that video. Here's a screenshot that exposes a little of the top-left side.

Open Source Initiative President



Recent Techrights' Posts

What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
 
Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025
Links 25/04/2025: Slop Fatigue and Patent Judges Flocking to Fake, Unconstitutional and Illegal Kangaroo Court (UPC, Captured 'Justice')
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Night Manager and Devuan in Hosting
Links for the day
Approaching 10,000 Articles/Pages Since Going Static
Trying to silence or derail the site was always a dumb strategy
Windows Falls to New Lows in Nicaragua, Now Below a Quarter (It Used to be Almost 100%)
Another all-time low for Windows
Microsoft is Shedding Off Loads of Staff and That Can be Dangerous Too
Working for Microsoft is a choice; nobody forces you to do it
Richard Stallman and the Unix Philosophy
When asked about systemd people must remember that RMS speaks as an active Board member of the FSF and also the founder of the FSF
The Cost (to Linux) of LLM Slop
Slop 'artists' like Fagioli are far from harmless
Links 25/04/2025: Ubisoft Spyware, Hegseth Fails at Tech on Every Level
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Food Forest Update and Facebook Destroying the Net
Links for the day
Get Rid of Back Doors, Don't Obsess Over Bounties and Other Corporate PR Stunts (or Needless Reboot Rituals)
Security as a term has mostly lost its meaning due to repeated misuse for many years
Serial Sloppers Are Killing the Web (They Probably Don't Care, Either)
Slop is a disease on the Web
Streaming Apps Are “Investor Fraud” That Kills the Planet
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Things Get Increasingly Nasty at Microsoft Ahead of the Fake Results and May's Mass Layoffs Wave
They try to get people to 'resign' so that they won't count as layoffs and the company's 'wellbeing' will seem better
IBM's Debt Ballooned by 8.5 Billion Dollars in Just 3 Months!
Hallmark of a company in a state of disarray, trying to spend its way out of trouble
Big Trouble in GNOME
even GNOME people admit the CoC went wrong
Slopping the Trough: Disney Plus Loses Billions and the Decline of Physical Media in America
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 24, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, April 24, 2025