The Fall of the Open Source Initiative (OSI): Bylaws of the OSI a Shocking Oversight
The OSI elections and other matters led to a complaint to the California Privacy Protection Agency, as quickly noted here yesterday. We also showed where the money comes from and goes to. "Huge discovery!" someone has called this, but we showed similar things in past years. We just need to remind people. The OSI is basically a sham. For further background see the introductory part, part 1, part 2, and part 3.
Today we'll talk about bylaws. We'll revisit the subject later in this series.
"Nice!" one reader said about the series (so far). "I was digging through all the information and I know The Register got to it today before I got you a draft, but here’s the thing during my deep dive into the OSI... I discovered something very interesting."
Someone was looking into this and drafting a summary. "The OSI could, in principle," an associate said, "still salvage itself but that would require some major changes in priorities, including turfing out the Microsofters. OSI failed to get a trademark for Open Source, but could still defend FOSS through establishing some kind of certification programme as a means of marketing and outreach, not just license compliance."
We'll deal with a trademark debacle later in this series as well, but first, a word about the bylaws.
For those who don't know what bylaws are in the United States:
So who's really in charge and who governs the OSI?
One might expect the founders and founding principles, right?
"However," our researcher discovered, "in their bylaws, it says specifically and explicitly declares no members. Yes. I had to read that three times because I couldn’t believe my eyes. You can’t make this stuff up!"
We shall come back to that at a later stage. We'll explain why that matters because it relates to other things which happened more recently.
"And apropos," an associate notes, "run it like a business -- into the ground and then ask for a bailout".
In the case of the OSI, it seems like the bailout came from Microsoft, with many strings attached. The failure of the OSI rendered it "up for sale". Latterly, it was rendered a puppet.
That's what the OSI is right now: a salesperson. "Basically reputation laundering and other laundering," an associate dubbed it, linking or likening that to the Linux Foundation (LF) and "the 3% (iirc) that is actually spent on Linux" (it is even less than 3% now; the openwashing at LF has nothing to do with Linux and goes against Open Source).
In the next few parts we'll talk about recent OSI sandals. With bylaws as specified above, the OSI is "A Boat Without a Captain". █