The Fall of the Open Source Initiative (OSI): Worse Than What the Media Has Focused on, Losing Sight of Who Owns and Runs the OSI

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 11, 2025

Members' dues are less than 3% of the income; where does the 97+ percent come from other than Microsoft?

So yesterday we wrote about the OSI's election (or so-called 'election') in relation to timezones. Some puff pieces pretended that all the recent controversy boiled down to an innocent misunderstanding or a real but minor error. Nothing could be further from the truth and transparency is imperative now.

In the introductory part, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 (plus addenda [1, 2]) we gave some background information and part 4 spoke about the bylaws. We have a lot to say about that today and later this week.

This is what the OSI itself says:

A source of ours looked into that. "And then," the source said. "I read the bylaws which were updated in August 2023."

"The OSI posts their bylaws," the source added. "OSI is a California corporation and bylaws are meant for internal governance inline with state law. There have been questions about lobbying."

"Lobbying aside, take a look at the bylaws."

As the source put it:

Article IV Members.

According to the posted and updated bylaws:

ARTICLE IV MEMBERS

Section 1. MEMBERSHIP. This corporation shall have no members.

Wait a second. I had to read this 3x because I could not believe my eyes. According to the publicly available list of members, there were 589 members in 2021. So, if the bylaws state no members, but the OSI is taking paid and free membership, what is going on?

Confused?

We are too. But we'll come back to this later and sum up some key points again.

As we shall show later on: 1) the bylaws state there are no members, but that's not what's happening. 2) it makes the OSI look independent, yet there are many hundreds of members and there are corporate affiliations, even conflicts of interest. We can see that in the list of names.

Remember that the OSI's staff will habitually censor/libel critics [1, 2]. So don't trust a word they may say about this. They even censor and ban their own people! The OSI has been part of the "Cancel Mob" which has long sought to libel perceived "enemies" [1, 2]. They work for GAFAM; some work for GAFAM directly. █