About me

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I'm a software engineer and Debian ftpmaster. 

I've passionately advocated for free and open source software for over 10 years. I first meaningfully engaged with the free software community in 2007 at the encouragement of my then-secondary-school computer science teacher, starting out by helping with QA for the One Laptop per Child project. Shortly thereafter, I worked to maintain the spin-off Sugar Labs' project infrastructure, and became a Debian and Ubuntu developer. 

My day job is in computer security, but I also help manage my company's open source programmes, and was one of the founding members of the TODO Group, a Linux Foundation project to help companies be better free software users and contributors.

As a Debian FTP team member since 2012, I'm intimately familiar with the details of license review, and at the same time also sensitive to the impact that DFSG-freeness or OSI approval can have. 

My position

Free and open-source software has exploded in popularity in the last few years by any metric: users, contributors, projects. Along with this, we've seen a number of actors try to leverage the goodwill toward "open source" and twist it in a way that serves their commercial interests at the expense of user freedom.

"Not-quite-OSD" licenses are not new. What's different is the concerted attempt to position such licenses as "basically open source", trade on the word association of various free culture terms, or even seek their direct certification as OSI licenses. Let me be clear: licenses with expansive, overly-burdensome requirements that extend beyond the scope of the original work are not free & open-source licenses. As a member of the board, I'd push for OSI to publicly take a stand against this attempted watering down of the OSD.

I also want to help support the OSI grow its membership — we have approximately 500 members, which is less than 30% of Debian contributors alone. Accordingly, I support gratis (or severely discounted) individual membership for members of affiliate organisations. Contributors to such organisations are the lifeblood of free and open-source software, and the OSI needs to hear their voice.