Read more about the OSI Board.

Read the Beyond-Licensing email archives for more details about the project.

Meeting Notes

• Beyond licensing: meant to explore open source just beyond the scope of licensing - what is the raison d'etre of the OSI beyond keeping a list of licenses
• A license is not enough to create a successful community & project, but these things are not as well defined as e.g. The Open Source Definition
• Open standards requirements are a good addition to the purview of the OSI
• Branding is important for open source projects, see recent post from Shane Curcuru on Beyond Licensing list
  • Company leadership who is disconnected from marketing dept understanding of open source and who co-opt open source brands / branding (e.g. Hadoop)
  • People want to work on projects because of the "brand" - reputation, credibility, etc.
  • Not every project needs to get to the point of needing "branding" but if you wait to long then your brand can have been coopted by businesses, etc.
  • Foundations exist to hold marks and allows for use of them in a sane way, e.g. differently than a trademarked name of a 'project' which is owned by a VC funded company
  • Company involvement can skew the perception of your project before you are aware it is happening
• Open source needs marketing & marketing education! ^^
  • OSI can provide education and basic models for trademark usage or amplify signal of modern trademark guidelines & FOSS Marks project
  • Guide on what to worry about and when in your lifecycle for branding for projects so you don't burn cycles or get co-opted
  • 80% of trademark enforcement can be done with no cash outlay, just by sending a letter - can OSI provide templates for these polite letters?
• Governance models
  • Copyright aggregation - this can be dangerous if any one entity exercises too much control over code base copyright
  • How do we organize our open source project
• Social responsibility of the open source movement / organizations within it
  • Are codes of conduct something we should talk about as a best practice?
  • Free software and policy, e.g. bill introduced in New York City Council advocating government prefer FOSS in procurement - cuts costs, use local contractors vs. big vendors, set target for amount of open source being used, software produced by government should be released as open source
• How to tell if a particular project is "good" to engage with / contribute to
• How do we engage authentically with open source communities when we're a business using/creating open source software
• OSI has capacity and neutrality to compile and index this kind of best practices content, the question is where to start - we want to be the 'reference desk'
  • Would there be a peer review process for this content?
  • What is the approval process for a particular document / syllabus / piece of work?
    • Could be the committer model to avoid endless debate
• Employee and employer relationship around open source stuff - employment contracts, expectations of time to spend contributing, copyright assignment in work for hire situations, etc.
• Sustainability of working on open source as an independent developer
• Dealing with large and old companies trying to figure out how to use and deal with open source software and change agency within their organization
  • documenting the journey of these long existing companies to open source, e.g. Airbus determining the only way to support software in their aircraft, which can be in service 50-80 years, requires open source
• Case study approach for business models of open source
• Bridging the gap with younger/newer open source engineers who have a different understanding of these values and what they need
  • Newer projects didn't really care about licenses in the first place - look at GitHub 3-4 years ago, now GitHub is recommending a license as you spin up project
• What if OSI was to do something along the lines of harvesting ideas from various sources and then link to references
• Is it that difficult to do this?
• Organizations need to understand the goverance model.  We can make lists of things to read, but there is more guidance needed.
• Can we think of a more modern word than governance??
• If not OSI, who? asks a board member. 
• Key idea is to find information to share rather than creating content whole cloth
  • to that end, Deb suggests the idea floater volunteer to do a trial project to create a page with reference
• Would be valuable if OSI would come up with language that defined elements of governance
  • create a working group to measure the model
  • satifies our interest in bringing in new groups
  • would like to create a list of indicators that would indicate openness
• The FLOSS Foundations tutorial (OSCON circa 2013-14)  is great fodder for starting with material for sharing
• OpenOffice community has actually grown without a community manager

Recap and close round table: Take-aways, closing toughts, suggestions

• OSI board should talk about how it's different than other open source entities.
• What's OSI's role in this galaxy of stuff? If OSI can articulate that, from there what goes beyond licencing will fall out.
• Working on licenscing , governance education will help the ecosystem evolve because otherwise. Also branding ad trademark.
• (Patrick) I ike the idea of becoming a resource library of content. Would like to qualify what kind of contet would help.  Also eats oru dogfood on reuse rather than creation.
• We didn't talk about how we can get corporations to be better actors in open source.  Would a good place to start be identiying exemplary projects
• Josh Berkus's presentation "10 ways to competly destroy your open source project" would be a great resource for this.
• One way to collect it woud be to start the governance model project "why it's important" to have governeace.
• A good example of collecting governance comes from hackerspace design patterns, but it's helped blossomed there.
• We've discussed many ideas we can do, but we need folks that will show up and do things.
• Big issue, getting corporations to understand open source
  • increasing level of interest
  • need to help
• OSI two things
  • Legacy: we can not afford to discontinue stewarding open source
  • Today yet: Help under
• Metaphore: Chemical elements .  In a more known world, it's understood how elements react together.
• 
  
• Thanks all!