What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
OSI has gone "full Microsoft". Instead of investigating the scandals the OSI is trying to chase people who merely speak about them.
Photo of Mer Joyce and Stefano Maffulli by Heather Joslyn (editor in chief of The New Stack, sponsored by Microsoft to promote Microsoft [1, 2]. Text added by us.
This is the first part of a mini-series about the OSI, a phony organisation which may be fighting for its very survival following a series of blunders.
Back in March we wrote about the rigged OSI elections (part of a previous chapter) and left things off when we felt the community had already begun discussing the problem a great deal (at increasing levels of depth, too). Many people caught up with blunders they had missed for years. We decided to get back to that within a couple of months. The reasons shall become more apparent some time soon.
A person's suspension notice image tells the story.
They obviously try to hide quite a lot.
The OSI is acting like a dictatorship, not a transparent organisation.
A correspondent of ours investigated this matter and explained: "During the course of our conversations, he let me know that his account was suspended. Indefinitely. [redacted] then requested a student account which he had heard of, and was in contact with someone who had a student account."
"I went searching for the Student Membership on the OSI site and could not find one, but what I did find was interesting. There is a basic account for $0.00. More research indicated, in order to vote, you must have a paid membership. These range from $50 to $300USD. Only 'pay to play' members can vote. According to https://opensource.org/about/board-of-directors/elections/individual. Basic membership is free but does not offer the ability to vote. But wait, there's more!"
"I found this information from the OSI forum regarding [redacted]. Stefano's response to discussion topic where a member discloses the fact [redacted] reached out on Linkedin."
To quote in case they censor it:
"Hi Andrew, I’m sorry that this happened to you. We’ve received other complaints about his behavior recently, related to that post and others. Unfortunately we don’t have control over his behavior. All we could do is ban him from these forums after we witnessed multiple occurrences of his abusive behavior."
"This states all the OSI could do was ban him from these forums... after we witnessed multiple occurrences of his "abusive" behavior," our correspondent said. "I was tagged as one of the members on the OSI list. I did not find his behavior abusive at all. The way I saw this was a concerned member of our community reaching out for assistance."
To quote more:
"I don’t know how he managed to associate your name to an OSI membership: that information is privately kept by OSI on a secure server. We’re not aware of any unauthorized access to the server or the application that manages members data. Regardless, I’ve asked our IT person to investigate."
"They don't even know how did the list of members was accessed," said the correspondent. Maybe they know now because they are under investigation for it.
"The list of members is publicly available using the election 3rd party vendor Helios," noted the correspondent. "While OSI may have "privately kept" the member list on a secure server, the list was shared with the 3rd party who did not keep the information private. After all, information wants to be free! The IT people might take a while, so to the OSI IT department - here's a cluestick - THIRD PARTY VENDOR for elections. No reason to spend a lot of time figuring that out..."
Back to the public page:
"There may be another explanation (thanks for capturing evidence, too). From the list of contacts mentioned by the individual, I get the feeling he may have been keeping tabs of people who have commented on OSI’s posts. I see there names of current and former board members, names of people who work for current and past sponsors, people I know personally and (IIRC) made comments on posts I wrote on LinkedIn…"
"There is no other explanation and this type of speculation is offensive," the correspondent said. "I understand wanting to understand how, but anyone can access the list. OSI cannot even steward their member list much less the Open Source Definition."
Back to the above:
"Do you remember writing in support, reposting or commenting about the Open Source AI Definition? Maybe that’s why he considered you a person of interest… Sorry again for that."
"That is an assumption and in my opinion, far reaching and incorrect," the correspondent concluded. "I never posted anything to the forums or emails regarding (the joke and miserable failed attempt) of an Open Source AI Definition attempt by OSI."
"Keep this in mind, the "stewards" claim to protect your privacy, but they failed at that also."
When we first wrote about some of these scandals a couple of months ago we didn't expect the matter to still be discussed for several months to come.
At this point the attempt to "contain" the scandals by silencing people backfires so badly that all the OSI can do it keep silent (for weeks) or bring back the Microsoft shill to its blog, talking about totally unrelated things or publicly promoting Microsoft's proprietary software.
We do not believe the OSI can recover from this. It might be replaced, as the need will arise for licence enforcers that aren't compromised (bribed) by the biggest licence violator (Microsoft). █