 gotten sick and will not be here today and one of them may be here a little bit later but we're going to introduce ourselves then we're going to give a lightning report of our meeting with the European Commission talking about the EUPL and then I'm going to talk about the future work of the OSI in the year 2009 so I will begin the introduction section I am Michael Thiemann I started my work on open-source software by downloading the GNU C compiler in June of 1987 I used that as the basis of developing the GNU C++ compiler which I released in December of 1987 and then continued to amend until about 1996 I started the world's first open-source company also known as Free Software back in those days in 1989 it was Cygnus and I still have the t-shirt and and our tagline was we make free software affordable and it was the first open-source or free software business to be to make a million dollars the first one to earn venture capital and and the first one to deliver revenue to Red Hat via acquisition we were acquired in January of 2000 but as far as the OSI is concerned I joined the OSI I think in 2003 and I became president in 2005 and we have thought and the work that I have done is trying to integrate the concepts of open-source legal issues and community issues and with business strategy and technology policy and strategy in the public sector my the company Red Hat pays for my travel around the world and has given me the opportunity to meet with ministerial level people in probably more than a dozen countries and has really enabled us to advance the cause of open source as a strategic directive so that's my brief introduction and the next on in the batting circle is Russ Nelson he doesn't know it but he's going to be next and so Russ when he hears this will will come and and introduce himself okay Russ are you ready are you paying attention excellent so this is Russ Nelson and and he is a founding board member of the OSI and introduce yourself and then hi I'm Russ Nelson I've been developing free software since well okay so I was willing to give away my software many many many years ago but I had nobody to give it to because I was not part of any free software or open source community essentially what happened was I started with the radio check color computer 3 which was a 68 or 9 processor and I was writing assembly language for that made some nice games sold into some cassette distribution company for not an awful lot of money came back to college saw I had seen emacs when I was working at Hulu Packard and I said in that's nice but I wanted to run on these microcomputers so I started writing a programmable editor based on emacs contacted Richard Starman and Richard Starman called me I contacted him and said I want to sell this this manual which is in the public domain with my software is that okay with you maybe I shouldn't have asked because of course it was legal but it was not okay with him he called me and said you know why don't you just give away your software and I kind of thought you know I'm not making all that much money off the software yeah sure I'll just give it away why not and that was the beginning of my free max editor which was actually looked at the license a few years ago and it's a even a pre GPL community type license it's it's that old a piece of software and that was when we first first start distributing that 1985 I think that would have been something along those lines so not quite as long as BDL if you were at BDL's talk he's been distributing his software since 1979 he was still in high school so I got infected with the bug quite early when open when I knew Arc Raymond from from the news no it was C news he was going to make a new version of the use net reader use net server software and distribution and so I knew him from that and when it came time to form the OSI board he knew about my distribution of free software knew that I had some respect in the community at least and said hey Russell why don't you come join us introduction on history well my history is part of my introduction no yes so I count myself as an anarcho capitalist which is not of course the same as an anarchist but it means that I love freedom so open source is in my mind at least all about the freedom and yes we don't say an awful lot about that in in our open source marketing materials but when you look at people's respect for freedom so many people say no no regulate me take my choices away make me do things so I'm kind of feeling like freedom is not all that popular a term not when you look at what people actually asked to do they want the benefits of freedom yeah but when you ask them if they want to be free that they're kind of like oh I'm not so sure about that it may not be such a good thing and you can't have open source without freedom this is much as I want to say Andy Oliver I'm Andrew Oliver I'm a open source software developer I'm Andrew Oliver I'm an open source software developer hi I'm Alelita Sharma and I'm can you hear me okay louder yes okay I'm Alelita Sharma I am on the board of the open service initiative I joined it's I've been on the board for about a year and a half it's been a very interesting experience because my background as a software developer and doing a lot of community outreach in India and advocacy with the government trying to introduce more open source adoption in India as well as an education to get the curriculum in the universities and the high schools to teach more open source and free software in the degree programs is something that I love to do so it has been really cool to be on the OSI because it's one of the few global community oriented foundations I think which encourage that all over the world and it's a privilege to be here I've never been at foster before and I'm really excited to see so many developers in one place of all the software that I love thank you hello I'm Harshad Harshad Ganesh from India I'm working with the University and primarily training providing training for last 10 plus years in open source so in a similar conference called Unify in my university it's primarily focused towards this promotional activities of the thank you hi I'll tell you my name when I finish because I don't want to confuse you it's got six ends so don't worry about it when I finish what's my background I don't write codes haven't written anything outside HTML but I come from a language that has 38 alphabets and that's enough for everybody I read English history humanities international relations and law so I still didn't read IT I'm a development consultant that's what I do and I came into the IT section from the development perspective and so we found that what we call the open source task force for Africa I don't live here I live in Africa that's why I come from and from the open source task force for Africa we founded what it's now first far the free software and open source foundation for Africa where I'm the console chair how many of you have had a first far oh my goodness okay first far means the free software and open source foundation for Africa is FAA net first for that net and one of the things we do is to organize what we call it Lailu which is the African conference on the digital commons and free software and open source every two years the next edition is going to take place in Accra in Ghana and I hope I'll be seeing some of you there if you want to talk to me about what's happening in Africa or what I do or what's happening in the IT section I'll be glad to talk to you after this now my OSI experience now Michael team and is the president and he says Red Hat pays for him nobody pays for me except OSI so if OSI did not exist I wouldn't be here do you understand what I mean I mean I have to be paid for somehow because open source and free software do not feed me even in Africa so this is something I do out of passion OSI allows me to put my passion of Africa of IT of development into this section now what's my name my name is and my son is welcome so the whole of it is thanks it's hard to compete with such a name my name is Martin Michael Meyer I'm from Europe I've been doing free software open source stuff for about 15 years I've been doing various things over the years but I'm mostly interested in in coordination so that there are some people who who claim that open source projects are not being coordinated you don't have to manage them they just work you know magically people do stuff and it's true people do stuff but at the same time in large projects you still need to see what's going on connect people and coordinate and so I've been involved in the Debian project which is a very large project and I was the leader for two years I've been on the OSI board for for about a year now and what I'm interested in I think that OSI is a good platform is a neutral platform which can provide information about open source about you know how to use it what does it mean what are the advantages does it offer and I think we should have an advocacy role and go out and promote open source so as you can see we've we've attempted to bring a diverse set of people together to help talk about and promote and advocate open source to a variety of folks it's it's unfortunate that I can't that two other people who were here yesterday could not be here today but let me introduce them in absentia I'm sure many of you know of Rishabh Ghosh he has worked at the University of Masters he published the first floss survey I think in 2001 it was a very comprehensive social demographic survey that looked at attitudes it looked at age population distribution by country gender hackers users etc. and basically created really maybe the first version of an open source census now Rishabh would immediately correct me and say no it was not a census because a census is the is a forced enumeration by the government and his was a voluntary survey but nevertheless it informed both his research projects which have influenced the opinions of the European Commission a subject I'll talk about next and and it has it has been wonderful at helping all of us in the open source community better understand our statistical norms Bruno Salza is our OSI board member who lives who happens to live in Sao Paulo Brazil and it's very interesting that in Brazil the the term by which everybody refers to the movements of free software and open source they perceive them in Brazil as a more unified movement and they call it software livery and software livery according to Bruno really means the the more inclusive definition of open source it does not mean free is in gratis software obviously in all of you free software people know it doesn't mean that but he explains that the concept of freedom is an element but it is not the sole element of the concept of software livery and what he also explains this if you translate open source into Portuguese and I can't remember the translation it means nothing so Bruno helps us understand how to take our messages and and and our community energy and translate them into a way that connects with a vibrant movement that has 10,000 people coming to their free software and open source conferences every year in Porto Alegre and how it is also influenced the direction of the Brazilian government to make their organizations better suited to serving the people so both Bruno and Rishabh have have tremendously helped incorporate government communities into our open source and free software communities so I'm sorry they can't introduce themselves but if you start to imagine this kind of global reach that meets on a monthly basis to discuss what we have learned what we have heard how we are being attacked not generally by the free software foundation but very specifically by companies like Microsoft then we are more aware of how we should properly respond in positive ways to ensure that the progress of the movement remains unimpeded so the last board member I'll just mention my name and with luck she will be here at some point to introduce herself it's Denise Cooper anyway the next subject I'd like to talk about is that yesterday we had a meeting with the IWC directorate at the European Commission and by way of background let me let me say that this that these concepts of open source have dramatically penetrated the consciousness of a variety of organizations one particular activity that I'm personally proud of relates to something called the conservation commons which is a project of the IUCN in Geneva it's the international union of environmental scientists they published the red list if you have seen that the 100 most endangered species around the world they came to discover that the variety of rules that prohibited the sharing of scientific information because of misguided national IP policy was making conservation science impossible to wit it the the through a variety of well-intentioned but poorly drafted legislative initiatives data was becoming wrapped up as into the concept of national property which which could they treated environmental data to be as sensitive as the actual trade in endangered species and so you can imagine that it's very very difficult because rivers and mountains don't rule and ecosystems don't really respect national borders and so if you want to actually study a whole system and the river joins two countries you can't you can't really share the data that comes from one side of the river with the people studying the other side of the river it's a big problem and in 2005 they invited me to to 2004 they invited me to a meeting to prepare for their for their world Congress to propose a way to share IP rights based on open source and on their website they specifically recognize the benefits of of the open source model of sharing and so in the session we have a following session from two to four where we'll talk about future goals and one of the things that we will certainly want to talk about is how do we expand the scope of the open source mission and consciousness to go beyond just the questions of free software and software licensing but also incorporate open data but to summarize that and quickly move into the EC report the fact is that our way of thinking our way of sharing our way of innovating and our way of sustaining is influencing the thoughts of numerous organizations and for that we're very very proud and for that we also hope that as you venture in your interest beyond mere software you consider how to take what I think are increasingly well defined and well articulated and well documented positions into education into scientific research into public policy and promote these ideas as best practices that work at a human scale so with that as a background we were we we finally had a chance to to meet with the organization responsible for the drafting a development and submission of the EU PL the European Public License many of you may know that over the past few years the OSI has gone from what what we would have called success to what Bill Joy in the past is called success disasters which is what happens when you succeed too well we didn't just have many open source licenses people thought we had too many open source licenses and they talked about license proliferation as being a problem and in B Dale's talk this morning he referenced a particular problem of combining open Solaris with W and user space being the legal uncertainty of license incompatibility certainly if Sun were to put open Solaris under GPL full stop end of story no shenanigans no backpedaling then the issue of license compatibility would be miraculously solved because it would be as compatible with every user space as the Linux kernel happens to be but as that has not happened the multitude of licenses has created a multitude of legal interpretations that must be assessed so the general stance of the OSI is to strongly encourage the reuse of license to strongly discourage the creation of new licenses nevertheless there come times when it is beneficial to adopt and incorporate new licenses into the list of approved licenses in the case of Europe there are the European Union is governed by laws and the European countries are constituted in languages that provide for something which has not been previously contemplated by the previous drafters of various open source licenses nobody did the work to define a license that was judged to be correct with respect to the local laws and correct with respect to the fundamental intention of a single open source license in 27 languages and properly at least interpretable by both the European Commission court as well as the national government court so this is it's a it's a remarkable document in this way that it interoperates with every single country at the EU level and at the country level and it is also equally valid in all 27 languages presently recognized by the European Union so that job was a unique job it solved a new problem and one of the things that that we recognize that the OSI is that the solution to a new and compelling problem is certainly something which is worthy of adopting as an innovation rather than simply saying I'm sorry we closed the door three years ago and we're not letting anybody else into the party so we were there to thank the the folks from the IWC committee responsible for interoperability and public administration to thank them for number one thinking about open source right who how many of us would have thought we would be having discussions with national governments when we joined this venture I mean you know Russ thinks we shouldn't deal with any national government but but I mean that in the general sense they just don't serve any useful function but but not only did they think about open source but they participated in the open source process they drafted a license and they offered it for public commentary receipt of which was acknowledged and and and actions thereby informed were taken and so in this iterative process in this process of good give and take a variety of people put the work together incorporated the community response and sent to the OSI for approval a license that had been thoughtfully drafted which had been developed with community input and the and and then important to us they offered to submit it to our process which means that we've now got good faith on both sides we've got the the generous good faith of the European Commission and we've got the good faith of the OSI board that we will duly consider this license according to our process and these two processes together yield what what I expect will be a positive result for both parties so this is cooperation the way we want to see it the the in the same way that the open source ideas influence the thinking of various organizations up to and including the European Commission the great work of the European Commission is also being noticed by other national entities and I have spoken directly with with ministers in Asia who have watched and learned from the European model and are emulating by name or by reference the those kinds of activities just this past week the the the special company established by the Japanese government for it's called the information promotion agency and they basically are the interface between the Japanese government and the and the IT and the and especially the software world they submitted to us a license for a set of funds which will enable any Japanese citizen to legally interoperate with electronic forms from the Japanese government without the requirement of running proprietary software so we think that it's very exciting that the Japanese government has recognized that it is important that they not demand of their citizens the use of proprietary software in order to legally transact business with the government and we think it is especially wonderful that instead of simply funding the development of three somewhat complicated fonts they have twelve thousand characters each instead of just funding that development and saying this is free for use by Japanese citizens they have submitted their license to the OSI process so that they can recognize open source as being something which is important and so it is remarkable that that country and and other countries are looking to positively join the open source community rather than merely adopt our terms and and then conveniently ignore where they came from or what community principles were active what else do I want to say about the EC discussion we asked what we could do to help and because we are most of us because first of all the OSI is not a European entity we are a California non-profit 501 C3 organization and because most of us board members are not EU citizens we don't exactly have standing to help the European Commission but what we can do and what we will do is to recognize the great work of the OS or how many people have heard of the open source observatory and repository so let me commend to you that OS or dot EU is one of the best collections of documentation of the use the successful use of open source in public administration that I have found anywhere in the world these success stories are not one-dimensional cartoons which is characteristic of many success stories you might read from a business but they are fully developed comprehensive studies that not only show the depth of the success but also provide a template so that others can emulate these and so stories from the Italian government stories from the Spanish government stories from the French government stories from the Netherlands all of these different stories help establish the best practices help establish the ways that people can move forward and we we will try to raise people's consciousness about this and also encourage and so you guys have more standing than we do so here's an appeal out to you if you look at the OS or our stuff and say wow I can see how this is gonna help our members of parliament and this is gonna help the European Commission better adopt open-source software you should think about sending your letters of support or or organizing to extend the or renew the charter of the OS or because it does need renewal it is scheduled not for anything they did wrong this is just how it works they're scheduled to end their work at the end of this year and I think it would be a shame to simply close that book and say wow that was a great job never again we should we should renew that work so we wanted to make sure that they'll understood our deep appreciation that they're following our policies and our and and respecting our community we wanted to express our admiration for the great work they're doing on OS or our and we want to extend a hand of global cooperation and collaboration to take the best practices that we're learning from India to take you know the the the needs that are developed in the and the opportunities that are evident in Africa in in Europe in the Americas north and south and around the world we we we would love to have the OSI be as representative as possible of all of these community interests so that every government and every company can practice it as best as possible so that's my short report from the European Commission and now we're now we're on schedule that was going to be delivered by Denise by the way so just you know pretend I'm her oh there you are welcome I didn't see you come in good for you do you want to introduce yourself you I have not introduced you so you can introduce yourself and then I'll talk about OSI goals thank you Michael speaking to it David how are you taking everybody out for drinks later actually I'd be probably not a good idea for me anymore I'm Denise Cooper and I had too much beer last night how about you guys am I not speaking right now yeah all right so I'm Denise Cooper and I have not been on the board quite as long as Michael but I've been on it for what seems like forever growing on eight years now and I've served as an officer on the board for a while and Michael just gave you my report my apologies because I had too much beer last night which was what I said before but in the years that I've worked for us I worked on OSI I've traveled all over the world Michael and I were sort of the big travelers initially and a few years ago it occurred to us that there weren't there wasn't anybody that wasn't American on the board which we thought was a big problem so we went out and recruited people from around the world so that we would have more accurate reporting about what was happening out in the world of open source we've had people from the Far East from India from Africa from Europe certainly so that we have a better idea of what's happening and we can look at our policies and make sure that they're serving the whole world and what we're finding is in Europe and and the United States it's pretty well understood at this point there's been a lot of good lobbying there's been a lot of support but for those of you who experienced the OOXML disaster here in Europe you'll know that it was pretty bad it was a far worse outside of this little cocoon we have of lots of activism there are many many people in India and in Africa and in the Far East tracking that problem but as individuals they didn't sort of have a lot of organization behind them and it was hard for them to have a strong enough voice to overcome the problems of proprietary software really trying to push an initiative that was neither standard nor open down the throats of ISO and the rest of us right now I actually believe that that was a pretty big miscalculation on their part I think that the fact that that happened the way it did and was documented as well as it was has hurt them in their now efforts to make friends with the open source community I think it's going to continue to be a problem out problematic for them in a way that allows us to continue to point out to them they need to work harder originally at the or the origination of the open source initiative air cream and spend a lot of time talking about proprietary companies or especially one proprietary company that had a lot of problems in their approach to open source more recently we stopped arguing directly with them in with the same voice in the same kind of frantic condemnation good word because when we went out into the world and we started meeting people that were involved in pushing free and open source software forward we found that there were an awful lot of people that didn't like the way that we were approaching that one company because it was just one company and because governments want to become interested in open source they don't want to feel like they're dealing with a band of hooligans they don't they want to feel like they're dealing with measured people who are taking deep consideration and working hard towards a goal and while many of us involved in the movement know that that those words can be used to describe some of the people that we're talking about it doesn't come across in the writing to the uninitiated when they first encountered this movement we didn't want the first experience to be so hostile and negative and so we've changed over and but that doesn't mean that we aren't still paying attention to what's going on or that we suddenly trust that one company in fact quite the opposite we spend a lot of time pointing out to them there are many foibles and and lately I personally have been pushing on them to create an ombudsman office so that when people out in the world find a problem they have somebody to address that so some of the other big companies that have worked in this area have come into open source software have done that son notably did that so that if you had a problem with son you could contact Simon and he would go try to figure it out and you know IBM has had this so his HP so I'm trying to tell them look if you want to make friends you got the first of all you get the problem that most of your company isn't interested in this but since you guys are and there are a few people that really are interested in this over there start let's start by make putting a voice out for people so it's one of the things that that we've done is continue to pressure not only them and I think it happens is people come to us and ask for help and it's starting to happen outside the US more and more Michael talked about the European Union public license which was submitted and there was commentary and as you guys know there have been some others Michael's maybe two months to talk about it but there's some people in Japan or did you already in the past we've done this mostly in the US because that's mostly who was writing new licenses but we know as as we're starting to talk to these countries that are interested now the first thing they want to do is write a license that's got their name in it right it's maybe it's human nature I don't know so we have to talk them out of that we have to talk them out into using one of the template licenses one of the things that we think are the better license practices and also just to maintain a space where both kinds of goal can still exist there are people in the free software movement who for whom the goal is keep the software free keep the code free there are people in the BSD and Apache movements for whom the goal is use the code as much as you can we don't care if it's free or not we ours is free but if you guys want to use it that's okay and that's it that's like a you know fundamental choice that they've made that's different than the free software stands a lot of free software people don't understand that stands a lot of Apache people and in BSD people don't understand the free stands we kind of try to sit in the middle and say there's room for both of these camps this is all still open source and and actually the whole picture of software that you guys are used to using needs both of those camps because the software good software is built in both camps right that so for instance Apache the web would be a lot different without Apache and Apache lives in that other camp and so is our other software that's built in the Apache software foundation they're not the only ones though so anyway that was a long description what else can I tell you you want to hear about me yes it's not that interesting I worked for six years for son I was the first corporate open source officer I got asked to be on the OSI and it was controversial at the time back when board members were picked by Eric Raymond pretty exclusively I was the first girl and and I was the first person that worked for big corporation that got pulled in this because I kept throwing my career on the line for a free Java even though we never really got it but and then I moved on to Intel and I was there for four years I've recently left Intel and I'm at my first startup yay which is really fun but it's an open source startup of course and during the time that I worked for son I I authored no less than five licenses that went through the OSI approval process for them so I know all about license proliferation and why it's bad and I will tell you that every single time I was asked to author a license I asked them not to I beg them not to I told them why not to I gave them all the reasons inevitably they wanted to do it anyway and then we just did the best job we could at trying to push them further down the football field you know the early days of open source were like that in in my country and they may be like that around the world in every country where it happens and in every company where it happens because you know it's companies have a hard time with this they want they're supposed to make as much money as they possibly can that's their goal especially if they're traded on some stock exchange somewhere and open source scales a little differently you can make a lot of money doing open source but it's different kind of money than if you kept the software proprietary and and screwed your customers right so okay that's enough about me you know everything you need to know now right yeah good so the last part of this lightning talk is is going to be a preview of what we're working on as our current topics I think it's very appropriate that when I came to Faustam this morning the very first person that I was introduced to and who introduced himself to me was Shane Martin Coughlin I don't know if you guys know him or not but he sells free legal services for the FSF Europe and that's a joke anyway it's appropriate because the first area that the OSI is really I think known for is our license review process and our license discuss lists and licensing related issues but a few years ago we brought on board Mark Radcliffe as general counsel he works for a big-time Silicon Valley law firm called DLA Piper and over the years their practice in the world of open source expanded dramatically from his desk to a variety of different concerns and there is great interest in the legal community to increase their exposure to and knowledge of and involvement with the open source community and now is a good time to have lawyers on your side because people are hoarding their software and claiming that they have no reason to need to distribute software that was given to them under the GPL and that's now being litigated it was litigated in Germany and it was litigated in the US and in both cases our side one and our side one in the US case in particular because we had some pretty high-powered legal help against a very wealthy and and very I don't know exactly what negative word I would use but I don't know if this is a correct use of the term or not abusive party but the good news is that free software Europe is building up its legal capabilities and the topics of licensing and legal issues related to proliferation, license description, classification, bus practice examples and thank God for the European Union and the European Commission that you are willing to enforce antitrust laws that the US itself has at its disposal that it itself are afraid to use so there are some very important licensing and legal topics and the fact that I met at least one person who's to trades in law tells me that there might be some other people who have similar interests in this audience and so that's one way to engage the OSI and we have a legal advisory board that's populated by a number of lawyers and we hand them juicy questions from time to time and they help us build legal strategy and policy for the survival of the movement. Another topic we talk about is education and this ranges from the engagement of people K through 12 I see some exels in the audience we have some in our family my daughter plays with them my my daughter's first programming exercise was Christmas Day two years ago when she modified the guest the number program much to her amazement to a more interesting game than one in a hundred we've since had to modify Pong because we can't play with the default program but make the paddle bigger make the give her give ourselves some more more bells and you know we're good we're good for an afternoon there's the education at the college and university level this this of course involves curriculum this of course involves education about open source community values there is education for businesses especially the sharing of bus practices and one of the things that we are coming to believe and I know it's very hard for you in an environment like this at a conference like Fastem to imagine that the number of young people who are savvy and conscious about open source values and free software values is actually seeming to diminish over time rather than grow it seems like we've we've we've had a great renaissance that has produced this generation but there is a shocking unawareness or a shocking taking for granted that we're seeing among really young people especially in the u.s. about the subject and so for those of you who are passionate about education the engagement of the next generation is perhaps the most important thing that we can do when the OSL wishes to engage that topic as best we can we obviously spent yes by one third by one tenth you can come up Andy this is a this is a come on up be passionate with a microphone so this is something that I noticed when I was trying to interview folks for my company and I spoke to a number of you know it was a associate developer in our company that's that's the most junior developer technical position and asking people they'd pass my technical interview you know what's what do you use when you've got two threads who are trying to modify or read the same piece of data on this kind of stuff and what's the average performance of a red-black tree and all this what's open source software Linux okay well what makes Linux you know special well I've used it in my university training blah blah blah okay so what what's different about it than Windows other than you know the cosmetic things and you know you might like it better you might dislike it better you know it's more character-driven whatever no real clue so what I started to do was kind of put together a basic open source training course for our company just what the heck is open source the basic stuff that we talk about all the time and I was like well you know this is really not going to help very much what I really want are people who at least have some idea on you know why their iPhone is probably evil they need to kind of have some idea of why these freedoms and why these things are more important so I start working with Alulita on a kind of a little education program where we can engage at the high school level and at the undergrad level and kind of explain what open source is what are the pieces of it and that kind of thing so we're looking for people to work with on this we don't want to make this some sort of you know big budget thing where a couple privileged few fly around the world we want to get a kind of a template piece of course material and have regional individuals who have connections their community and connections to you know local schools and universities and just talk to the professor talk to the teacher and say hey you know can I come in and you know you can sit in the back and grade papers for a day and and give a talk about what is open source software what why it's important why these kinds of freedoms are important and and go from there and then in the meantime they've got this great thing in India where they're doing just that with educators and training them about open source software and and I think that this is probably the most important thing that OSI can do because we really can't close the door behind us so if if you know one third of you are under 30 but you're weird I mean you're at Faustum your friends aren't here right and then you only know a few people who you know really know what it is beyond Linux well that's a problem we all need to solve together or what was this all for was it just a way for us to spend a decade and then forget about it so you know we value your help and contributions in in this area thanks Andy so so another topic we talked about we gave it a lot of airplay today is policy and economic development and this relates to the commercial benefits and values of open source public economic development projects there's a lot of people spending a lot of money on stimulus programs right now and how much of that is going to help how much of that is going to hurt and how much of that's going to be totally irrelevant to open source I saw a proposal in the US last month that suggested that the US government should allocate two billion dollars to spend on open source software I responded by writing a paper that explained that we waste a trillion dollars a year globally on proprietary software and you can go to the OSI board blog and you can read the details of that paper it's four pages of arguments and two pages of references so you can construct it's an open argument you can you can deconstruct it and if you think any of it is bogus please improve it open standards is a very politically charged question open data we're probably going to talk about this afternoon and looking at how OSIR helps the European community and UNDP helps the world in terms of understanding the connection of technology and and and human progress the ODF success story is an example of successful engagement in the policy sphere there's another topic which is the represent the representational ability and the authority of the OSI there are many people who who think that it is not entirely proper that a self-nominated and self-elected group of people regardless of how smart and charming we are it's ridiculous that we should think that we might speak for you because you did not elect us you did not necessarily have the decision authority to you did not necessarily vest with us your the ability to speak for you so we're working on a membership and an affiliation program we'll definitely be talking about that this afternoon and so that's a topic that we're really working on we want to make the OSI effective at faithfully representing the not just the spirit of open source but but all of its community members and then finally there's the topic of the governance of OSI well which relates to nominating the day-to-day work attending board meetings how we do fundraising how we do PR etc so those those are the five areas of focus for the OSI licensing and legal education policy and economic development governance and representation and authority and we would certainly invite your participation in our discussions this afternoon at two o'clock so somebody have a schedule where we're going to be at two we're going to be somewhere but not here and and we're going to be across the street what's that aw1105 and so with the five minutes of remaining before the next lightning round if anybody wants to ask questions while we're comfortable in this room go ahead yes so the question is is it feasible to come to a licensing classification process as already exist in some other spheres and the answer is absolutely yes we have already established through the work of the licensing proliferation committee a set of classifications it is a present topic of debate whether the categories are correct and whether the licenses are correctly attributed but one of the topics of the licensing work is to refine and improve the consensus of those classifications the classifications are available in the open source website we have the license we call it license categories or license classification we have a categorical so we have both alphabetical and categorical and the categories are things like very popular and well used special purpose non reusable um you know uh retired the creative commons classification say what they're useful for rather than how many people I see I see do I come up for us okay can everybody hear me I stand up I think that what this gentleman is looking for and he can certainly feel free to interrupt and correct me but the creative commons has uh an end by end grid of licenses where they said okay some people are going to want to be attributed they're going to want to require people to say I got this from here other people want no commercial use other people want to share a life and so they took those attributes and they made a grid and they populated the grid text that matches the license that the combination of license terms they started from scratch they started day nova we started with the gba the bsd license the lgpl and those licenses don't get into any standardizing this so the question is is it feasible for us to push in that direction of a harmonized set of licenses where you choose independently I want attribution I don't want to yes and no the issue of licensing is very complicated so if you guys want to follow the leaders we're going that way I need to sort of wrap up the session out of respect for the next speaker but I'll take one more question until somebody comes to take the microphone away yes the machine readable license format question rustia do you want to predicated classification simon fifth says so simon has probably already looked at how we might be able to do this the same question as before right to have them be readable you have to have a classification so so I do know yeah I do know that both Hewlett Packard with their uh phosology project uh is attempting to do machine classification of licensing schemes and building of metadata I think black duck stuff or also build some sorts of things like that I don't know to what extent they've attempted to externalize their ability to wrap these licenses into taxonomies we have done some work on licensing wizards that also relate to machine readability but that's that would be if you're interested in that topic as an r&d topic or as a hacker please join our licensing discussion group because that'll be work that we do this year we we we think that the community oriented process of public commentary is absolutely essential to any credibility so I don't see us I don't see us building a closed chamber environment uh where we make decisions uh that have not been informed by the community so yes thank you I think we can um yep I think we we can wrap up here uh thank you in uh about 20 minutes the real lighting talks will start which are by definition 15 minutes so this was something uh off track all right so um