How will you help develop open source in China and other developing nations? People like Naomi Wu have demonstrated that it can work there, but get little to no support.

What will you do to get companies to not only adopt OS, but to use it responsibly and not just to spy on users to restrict their rights?

There is only so much you can do with copyright, and unfortunately adding to our licenses provisions about the way people actually use the software would be unproductive. If we go down that path, we will end up having opposing licenses from different political camps, like pro-life and pro-choice licenses. What a nightmare that would be! And in the end, such licenses would probably be overturned by courts. Rather than each of us designing their own law and attempting to make it work in our licenses, we need to work for civil and criminal law that applies to everyone regarding privacy, security, and good practice in general by companies that control very powerful devices in our homes. 

Free Speech is important. If you don't like how a company is treating customers, write about it and share your writing with others. There must be a perceived cost for violating the rights of your users and customers. Or companies just won't care. But I think this is different between nations. There are things I would be confident to talk about publicly in California, because the US has Free Speech in the Constitution and California has an anti-SLAPP law, and in some countries a collaborative approach is all we can have because Free Speech is actually dangerous. Especially when government, rather than a private company, is the problem.

Then, there is the case of companies that do not respect the Open Source licenses, and do not comply with their terms:
We do approach companies privately - in the few cases where this doesn't happen, it's because others have already approached them and have been rebuffed. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that you never see. For example I have been trying to get compliance out of a drone manufacturer (in China) for over a year, where I actually own some of the copyrights in question. They have made some efforts to cooperate, but haven't released all that they should so far. Bradley Kuhn is the main person who works with accused infringers, and he generally tries to get compliance for years before Software Freedom Conservancy actually brings a lawsuit.

It's important to publicize when a company isn't being a good citizen. There must be a perceived cost for non-compliance, and when a company approached privately doesn't comply, publicity is a better tool than a lawsuit.

But perhaps the most important thing we can do when there is a persistent infringer is to make better software than theirs! I suspect a lot of the work on Linux containers and virtual machines is because people (and companies) would like to beat a certain company that hasn't been a very good citizen.

I did have a company sue me for three million dollars for calling them a GPL violator. I am fighting this case so that nobody else will be intimidated for saying that someone violates a license - especially their license. We are winning that case and have this $300,000 bond from the folks who sued me to pay my lawyers in the lower court case, O'Melveny and Meyers, if we win the appeals - which is very likely. EFF and O'Melveny and Meyers have taken on the appeals for free, as co-counsel. Please join EFF. Also, support anti-SLAPP laws in your state.

I think historically most of the thought around open source licensing has been in/around software code, intellectual property etc. Have there been any thoughts put into open data and licensing? Aspects about open source licensing but more geared towards data? Right to use, fair use, access to data that started as public data but has either been brought into commercial applications / pay-walled etc?

Something which has been of interest to me related to things like a smart city initiative. How, if at all, would things like open source licensing relate to the data collected. Right to use, de-identification ( and granularity ).

Bill, the first thing we should consider is whether Open Data can, or should, be copyrighted at all. In general, the law does not support copyright of simple statements of facts, and this has been very important to the Open Source community so far. For example, Astrolabe, a producer of astrology software, sued Open Source programmers Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert, who created and maintained the time zone library and database (tzlib and tzdata). This library and database are used on Linux and are incorporated into most of our programming language libraries, and are part of many commercial operating systems. Astrolabe owned the rights to the ACS International Atlas, which Olson and Eggert used as a reference. Astrolabe sued for infringement, and EFF defended Olson and Eggert and won. Did I say enough times yet that you should join EFF? Olson and Eggert depended on the time zone information being in the public domain. Similarly, you depend in many ways on basic facts remaining in the public domain.

That said, you can get a copyright on the arrangement of the data, rather than the data itself. And you can license that. But in general you don't own the facts, even if you put a lot of effort and expense into collecting them.

And in general, it is better that this stuff not be protected than it would be if it was and we were able to enforce our licenses effectively, because more people would be enforcing their licenses against us, and all of the ways we use data.

So, I don't have a really good solution for you. I'd be happy to discuss this more.

Bruce,

The more I think about my original question it's likely more in context of governance and individual rights. It's likely a local/state/federal law(s) debate. Thinking of GDPR and the like vs the licensing of the data.

Thanks for the response and all you have done for the community!

Bill

Bill,

You are correct that we need data privacy law for data about individuals, and we need law about making data that isn't about individuals public when it's part of government-funded research. I am encouraged by the open publication movement and how well it is taking hold in scientific circles. Note the recent spat between UC Berkeley and Elsevier, for example. Regarding the privacy law for individuals, the closest thing we have so far is HIPAA. Although criticized for its size and complexity, it has gotten pretty much everyone in the medical and health insurance industry trained to protect patient-identifiable information and to anonymize it. Even in ham radio circles when assisting in emergency communications we are now trained to anonymize patient health data.

Many candidate statements here only express interest in membership-building, PR and publicity, and evangelism. This is disappointing. I would expect an OSI director to be on top of more policy issues. I would have liked to see more upon:

• Issues of women and people with different gender identities and their participation in Open Source.
• The new licenses that have recently been submitted, which tend to put the project-originator's profit ahead of freedom and place significant restrictions on use.
• Patents and Open Source, especially standard-essential patents and standards organizations that enact a "FRAND" patent policy that locks out Open Source.
• Continuing to heal the schism between Free Software and Open Source, although this is not a criticism of the current OSI: they've done a really good job of resolving the issue.
• Your favorite issue.

Actually Bruce, I think I dealt with almost all of your bullet points, not by addressing them specifically, but in my thoughts about open source, the players in the current evolution of open source, and what can and can not be accomplished through open source licensing. About the only issue that I did not address was gender issues, because I've been fighting gender and sexuality battles since the 1960s and certainly don't want those issues to be the centerpiece of my campaign. However, this old hippie can assure you that she's 104 percent on the side of equality for all peoples and for creating work and living spaces that are free from harassment and roadblocks, whether visible or invisible.

Christine, you did address policy issues and you got my vote because you did. Some candidates still have not. And obviously you could instruct me on women's issues, although I'm trying hard. I got to deal with a male professor tone-policing a woman scientist this week. It frustrated me that this still goes on in 2019. I'm sure it frustrates you more.

Thank you for your vote, Bruce. Sorry to hear about your fellow student's problems with an ahat professor (I'm assuming she's a student). Academia can be like a feudal fiefdom.

What do you think could be done to involve more students into the OSI? 

As a high-schooler, I consider myself fortunate enough to know enough and care about open source but there are a lot more students who don't, especially in developing nations. As such, I'd say the only program I've witnessed that helps promote Open Source globally among teens has been Google Code-in. 

I'd like to know what more could possibly be done considering it is the younger generation that will represent all that we stand for in the future.

Great question, Aadi,

I think we need to take some of the existing educational programs, see if they are good enough or need more work, make them  easy to pull offline and use, and encourage STEM teachers to add them to curricula. ARRL does this for ham radio and has a summer workshop for teachers with grants to fly them to it and lodge them. Why shouldn't we do it for Open Source? This takes volunteers to work on it. If people like you volunteer and take on the project, we can get it done. We have corporate friends who could fund this.

I asked questions of a number of candidates. All but one answered (so far), and all of the answers were really good IMO. I didn't ask questions of all of them in the hope that others would.

I really appreciate that the candidates have their heart in this. This isn't really the sort of election where there are opponents.