OSCON 2012: Simon Phipps, "OSI -- More Relevant Than Ever"

OSCON and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) have a long relationship, going back to OSI's founding in 1998 by a group of people that included Tim O'Reilly. Over the last decade, OSI has been steward of the "gold standard" of open source, the Open Source Definition, and has anchored the transformation of open source from marginal campaign to mainstream default for software.

But times change. Now that open source is the assumed default for all new software, the community needs more than just licenses. The Board of Directors of OSI has been working behind the scenes to craft a transformation. Hear direct from Board members and new Affiliates what has changed, ask questions about the new organisation and perhaps even join at this surprisingly lively session.

Simon Phipps

Open Source Initiative

Simon Phipps has engaged at a strategic level in the world's leading technology companies, starting in roles such as field engineer, programmer, systems analyst and more recently taking executive leadership roles around open source. He worked with OSI standards in the 80s, on collaborative conferencing software in the 90s, helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM and was instrumental in open sourcing the whole software portfolio at Sun Microsystems. A Director of the Open Source Initiative and the UK's Open Rights Group, he takes an active interest in Free and Open Source software, serving at OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and OpenSPARC, and is a widely read commentator at Computerworld and his own Webmink blog.

He holds a BSc in electronic engineering and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Open Forum Academy.

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