Brendan Hickey, 2019

Last modified by BrendanHickey on 2019/03/04 00:25

Why are you running?
The bedrock principles of the open source are under attack:

No matter who you are, you can use open source software.
No matter what your purpose, you can use open source software.
No matter where you live, you can use open source software.
No matter who pays you (or doesn't), you can use open source software.

The years have seen efforts to target this or that cause through licensing -- militarism and nuclear weapons are popular carve outs -- and the past year is no different. An anti-open source abuse campaign has taken aim at so-called "cloud providers" who sell reliable, highly-available infrastructure. We've seen a parade of Trojan Horse licenses, holding themselves out as open source without really meaning it. We've read the demands that we capitulate our principles for the sake of "relevancy." With three members of the board terming out open source needs new defenders.

In the face of these attacks it's essential that we reaffirm our commitment to the OSD's non-discrimination clauses: Software that asks who you are, why you're using it or who's paying is not and will never be open source. This is the line we must hold, not because we like seeing money get made, but because the alternative is an unworkable mess. I pledge to defend the open source definition. I want the OSI to proactively engage commercial producers of open source software. If something isn't working for them it's better to get ahead of the problem rather than be blindsided by attacks on free and open source software.

License Review

The OSI performs a critical policy function through license review. At the time of writing this, I am one of three candidates active on the discussion lists. We should streamline the review process to attract more policy perspectives:

  • Move license-review from a mailing list to a document review tool. Structured review will help the community and board understand why license language is important or problematic.
  • Provide additional guidance to help submitters avoid common problems (ex. common clauses that run afoul of the OSD)
  • I will continue my engagement with license-{discuss,review}.

Future Challenges

The past few years have seen the spread of open source machine learning models, primarily under the Apache License v2. It remains to be seen if existing licenses are sufficient for model licensing and I would welcome innovation.
Recent litigation around API copyright has illuminated opportunities for narrow licenses covering software interfaces. It's better to bring people under the tent of open source when possible than to fragment the ecosystem.
I will conduct a review of non-reusable licenses with the aim of encouraging their respective stewards to voluntarily retire them and transition to more popular licenses.

Misc.

The OSI board is elected using plurality-at-large. This system is non-proportional and produces landslides at the expense of compromise. Moving board elections to another system would signal a commitment to pluralism, even if it doesn't change election outcomes.

Who are you? 
Professionally I'm a software engineer at Google. All opinions are my own and my candidacy is not endorsed by my employer. Some of my open source contributions include:

  • WeScheme, a cloud Scheme IDE developed in support of Bootstrap World
  • Dungeon Crawl, a popular roguelike
  • A one byte patch to the Berkeley Packet Filter debugger.
  • CloudyFS, a Haskell FUSE filesystem that tells the weather.
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