Jacob Redding

Last modified by Deb Nicholson on 2021/03/05 21:07

The Future of the OSI

The open source initiative (OSI) has been a mainstay and the bedrock of the open source community. It is always there, stable, and unwavering in its dedication to promoting the usage of OSS and being the lighthouse of license interpretation. Open Source has won the software war and is the new de facto standard and base of nearly all software. With this exponential growth we will see new challenges and new licenses crop up and a need for guidance and leadership to help the ecosystem navigate all of these. 

I believe the OSI can and needs to rise to this challenge by growing at a significantly faster rate to bring it inline with the exponential industry growth. Through a paid staff and stronger revenue model the OSI can not only pull together open source experts to help navigate new license, license interpretation challenges, but also help guide the many new entrants to the open source ecosystem so they build new software under OSI approved licenses and collaborate effectively using Open Source principles.  The OSI brand and name should be ubiquitous across every software development, product management, and legal review teams around the world - that would be my goal on the board. 

Tl; DR - Let’s grow! 

Why Me? 

A Developer and Technology Architect by trade I’ve been contributing to and helping to grow Open Source projects for over 20 years. I spent over a decade working with the wonderful Drupal community to help form various leadership positions within the Drupal community and form the non-profit Drupal Association (link). We grew the Drupal Association from an all-volunteer organization to a full-time staffed team dedicated to support the Drupal project. I then brought this experience to Accenture to help shift the tide of large major systems integrators with hundreds of thousands of developers to create, collaborate, and contribute to Open Source software projects. I regularly consult with our clients on how to build their open strategy and governance models including advising how to build and create their own open source foundations. I have a talk on this subject of Enterprise collaboration in OSS  at pre-pandemic FOSDEM and I teach Distributed Software Development within the OSI co-created Open Source program at Brandeis University.

This perspective of what is happening within Enterprise software development firms I believe is the unique perspective of what I bring to the board of the OSI. OSS is permeating every aspect of nearly every industry and OSS principles are being adapted to this ever changing technology aspect. I’m very focused on where OSS is in 2030, 2040, and beyond - the groundwork for these changes need to be structured now to sustain the next several decades of technological innovation. 

I’m very social, but not always on social media - Read more about me on LinkedIn, Follow me on Twitter, and reach out at anytime. 

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