Hi, I'm VM (Vicky) Brasseur. You might know me from…well, all over the place, really. While I'm a proud recipient of the Perl White Camel Award and identify as a member of the greater Perl community, most of my free/open source contribution is consulting with and advising leaders of all sorts of different free and open source projects and organisations. In 2016 I was honored to be awarded the O'Reilly Open Source Award for my efforts so far. I'm also a very frequent public speaker  on topics open, community, and managerial in nature.

We're in an exciting period in open source. At first we had the days of RMS, ESR, and the birth of openness as an organised technological ideology. Next we shaped and refined that ideology over a couple of decades of breakneck growth in usage, adoption, production, and awareness. OSI was formed during this time and played a vital role in focusing perceptions and efforts around what is and is not open source software.

Now we've arrived in the modern age of open source, or more specifically we can say that open source itself has arrived. Open solutions are the go-to for most new technological endeavours. Linux can be found in cars and toasters and watches. Even your older relatives have heard of it. We could borrow a page from Darcy DiNucci and Tim O'Reilly and call it Open Source 3.0, should we wish to stray into buzzwords.

Currently this popularity is cyclical: the more acceptance open source receives, the more participants it draws, spreading that acceptance and attracting more participants. While this is the future of which we've all dreamed, it's also a very critical phase of the evolution of open. 

An increasing number of these new participants are corporations or for-profit entities, which have the potential to have a dramatic impact on open source and spreading the ideology of open, but not if they don't know where to turn for guidance (or even that they should).

OSI is a trusted authority in licensing. We are in a position to extend that to be the trusted authority for other open source guidance and resources. Rather than providing the resources ourselves–which our budget and staffing could not support–we can use our experience to provide pointers to resources which are trustworthy and reliable. The businesses and other new participants will keep coming and they will need help. We can point them in the right direction. I would like to help.