The Problem at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Is Vastly Bigger Than Its Rigged Elections
A lot of the same applies to the Linux Foundation, where bribes buy you seats [1, 2], elections do not (but companies like Microsoft also pass bribes, which give them control over staff and elections). These are corporate lobbying fronts that misrepresent their authority/purpose.
Elections and election-rigging at the OSI are a symptom. There's a bigger bunch of problems going on. Zonker at LWN has just focused on the election again:
They need to ask more questions like the whys.
Why does the OSI rig elections?
Who controls the OSI anyway?
Where does OSI money come from?
The first comment said: "I found this retrospective summary to be underwhelming; in particular the statements about 'improvements in communication' were related to 'inbound structured feedback' from OSI members to the OSI... but in the sequence of events related to the election, the primary issue in my opinion was *outbound* communication from the OSI. They made decisions and acted on those decisions without communicating them to anyone except the candidates (in some cases, not all), not to the members or the public. Those of us outside the candidate pool learned about those decisions from the candidates when they chose to talk about them on social media and other places."
"Wol" spoke of "not explaining the rules properly. Like moving the goal posts after nominations have closed. Etc etc. Yes it's incompetence, but it calls the impartiality of the vote into serious question. Changing the rules AFTER the candidates' window for changing things has closed is - to put it bluntly - not a fair vote."
We'll write about this soon.
The last comment says:
The OSI likes to claim to represent Open Source developers and provide a definitive meaning for what Open Source is.For that to be considered legitimate they need to either only be descriptive about what is already considered to be true by consensus, or they need to democratically engage with the community so that if there is a divisive issue that needs to be settled the losing side can have the consolation that the decision was fair and they were genuinely outvoted, and if the result is close it can be identified that there needs to be some form of compromise.
Yes, they're a private organisation and legally can do whatever they want, but they've been portraying themselves as a custodian of a common-good.
I think it's fine to exclude a candidate if their position is contrary to the purpose of the enterprise (i.e. don't allow a fascist dictator to be democratically elected since their aims are to dismantle the democracy) but if the OSI feels existentially challenged that without accepting a weaker Open Source definition for generative "AI" they'll fade into irrelevance, and that allowing candidates that want to challenge that is an existential risk... then in my opinion they deserve that fate.
If you need to rig an election to preserve your legitimacy you never had it, and given the doubts about the processes I think its their responsibility to prove they haven't.
When we're done with our series next month or in June the OSI might be "Out of Business" (yes, business; that's what it is).
We see the same in Apache and even Python. Corporations try to herd, oppress, silence, and exploit "the community" via organisations that lack legitimacy and are run by bribes (the people who govern them recycle those bribes as salaries). █