Open Source Initiative (OSI) Privacy Fiasco in Detail: An Introduction
As promised somewhere along the way last night, this weekend we shall resume the long - and still growing - series about the corrupt (or corrupted) Open Source Initiative (OSI), which nowadays engages in openwashing and hype for big clients like Microsoft. It's not a coincidence they keep talking about "hey hi" (AI) all the time, and as recently as a few days ago as well. They get paid to do this. We'd like not to focus on the openwashing or the OSI 'election' but instead focus on privacy. We'll come back to all those other scandals later, probably in April and maybe in May as well. There's no hurry.
As we said yesterday, somebody made a complaint about the OSI. "I use the words woeful and neglect a couple times!" said the complainant. "And since Deb Nicholson was interim [General Manager], I named her also because it happened on her watch."
Deb Nicholson, who sought to water down Software Freedom, is nowadays busy bullying communities to advance the interests of companies like Microsoft (which she ushered into prior employers of hers; at the SFC they boasted that she had brought Microsoft money, selling keynotes on copyleft to the company that attacks copyleft with a bigger budget than most*). She came to the OSI after Patrick, the General Manager, had suddenly left (without a proper explanation; one can only guess). Since then OSI has gone downhill very rapidly; she's now doing the same in Python [1, 2]. Let's hope this agenda fails and Python as a community will survive; they want to make it another Go (Google) or Rust.
Techrights recently contacted the complainant, who is a former OSI member (remember that in the OSI members have no influence; over 97% of the OSI's money comes from companies like Microsoft**). The complainant can hopefully explain more about what's inside, i.e. the nature of the complaint.
Perhaps tomorrow or perhaps next week we'll share more information about what happened and what was reported to the California Privacy Protection Agency. █
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* They use the same man to do this in other companies too [1, 2] and now he's in the Linux Foundation on behalf of Microsoft. It's another coup.
** While it's true that they can vote they still lack control over who's running and various other factors. Once elected, Board members are indebted to those who keep the lights on, i.e. corporate sponsors who buy and appoint stuff, unlike Board members. Nobody gets to actually vote on staff members; people like Nick Vidal (Microsoft-sponsored) and the E.D. are there because of the "real owners" of the OSI. The Board is impotent.