What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: More People Begin to Speak Out
Prior controversy belittled by the OSI:
In the previous chapter we focused on many failings at the OSI. We planned to not write about it again until next week. But then Bradley M. Kuhn published "Signing Board Agreement Merely To Be Considered for a Directorship?"
Kuhn himself is running (after causing a stir inside the FSF's Board). He said:
All the (non-incumbent) candidates are now confused. OSI told us during the mandatory orientation meetings (on WED 2025-02-19 & again on TUE 2025-02-25) that the Board Agreement needed to be signed only by the election winners who were seated as Directors. No one mentioned (before or after the election) that all candidates, regardless of whether they won or lost, needed to sign the agreement. I've also served o many other 501(c)(3) Boards, and I've never before been asked to sign anything official for service until I was formally offered the seat.
Can someone more familiar with the OSI election process explain this? Specifically, why are all candidates (even those who lose) required to sign the Board Agreement before election results are published? Can folks who ran before confirm for us that this seems to vary from procedures in past years? Please reply on the fediverse thread if you have information. Richard Fontana also reached out to OSI on their discussion board on the same matter.
As we'll show later, the "purge" at the OSI goes further than this and it's getting quite ugly. "As an unexpected bonus," a source told us, they've managed to get many of the pro-OSI folks angry at the OSI. "When I told [redacted] just fyi," we're told, "[redacted] said that a lot of people supported [redacted], but not anyone took action."
So everyone kept quiet about it. Except... some who had the courage to reach out in public or at least pass us details.
We'll cover the rest of this story some time soon. In the meantime it looks like Kuhn set another bonfire ablaze. The "coup" has become resistant to people trying to crush the coup. Like a true dictatorship. █