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 Tiemann. 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 our tagline was, we make free software affordable. And it was the first open source or free software business to make a million dollars,

the first one to earn venture capital, 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 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.

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 in the batting circle is Russ Nelson. He doesn't know it, but he's gonna be next. And so Russ, when he hears this, will come and introduce himself. Okay, Russ, are you ready? Are you paying attention? Excellent. So this is Russ Nelson, 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 Shack Color Computer 3, which was a 68-9 processor, and I was writing assembly language for that. Made some nice games,

sold them to 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 Hewlett-Packard, and I said, Emacs? Oh, that's nice, but I wanted to run on these microcomputers. So I started writing a programmable editor based on Emacs,

contacted Richard Stallman, and Richard Stallman called me. I contacted him and said, I wanna sell 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 this software. Yeah, sure, I'll just give it away. Why not? And that was the beginning of my FreeMax editor, which was, I actually looked at the license a few years ago and it's even a pre-GPL community-type license.

It's that old, a piece of software. And that was, when did I first start distributing that? 1985, I think that would have been something along those lines. So, not quite as long as Bedale.

If you were at Bedale'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. I knew Eric Raymond from the news,

no, it was C news. He was gonna make a new version of the Usenet reader, Usenet 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.

I 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 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 ask to do. They want the benefits of freedom. But when you ask them if they want to be free,

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. That's as 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 Alalita Sharma. And I'm a, can you hear me?

Not very well. Okay, louder? Yes. Okay. I'm Alalita Sharma. I am on the board of the Open Source Initiative. I joined, 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 Bune from India. I'm working with a university and primarily providing training for last 10 plus years in open source. I also run a similar conference called Munify

in my university. It's primarily focused towards the promotional activities of the office. Thank you. Hi, I'll tell you my name when I finish because I don't want to confuse you.

It's got six Ns, so don't worry about it when I finish. What's my background? I don't write codes. I 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 founded what we call the Open Source Task Force for Africa.

I don't live here. I live in Africa. That's where I come from. And from the Open Source Task Force for Africa, we founded what it's now FOSFA, the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa, where I'm the consul chief. How many of you have heard of FOSFA?

Oh my goodness, okay. FOSFA means the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa is F-O-S-S-F-A dot net, FOSFA dot net. And one of the things we do is to organize what we call IBLELO, 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 Tieman 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 Nenana. Nenana. And my surname is Wacama. So the whole of it is Nenana, Wacama. Okay, that's all.

Thanks. Well it's hard to compete with such a name. My name is Martin Micklemeyer. 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 coordination.

So there are some people 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 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 how to use it,

what does it mean, what 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 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 unfortunate 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 Rishab Ghosh. He has worked at the University of Maastricht. 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, et cetera and basically created really maybe the first version of an open source census. Now Rishab would immediately correct me and say, no, it was not a census because a census 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 it has been wonderful at helping all of us in the open source community better understand our statistical norms.

Bruno Sousa is our OSI board member who happens to live in Sao Paulo, Brazil. And it's very interesting that in Brazil, 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 livre. And software livre, according to Bruno, really means the more inclusive definition of open source. It does not mean free as in gratis software,

obviously, and 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 livre. And what he also explains is 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 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 has also influenced the direction of the Brazilian government to make their organizations better suited to serving the people. So both Bruno and Rishabh 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 by 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 say 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, through a variety of well-intentioned

but poorly drafted legislative initiatives, data was becoming wrapped up as into the concept of national property 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 and ecosystems don't really respect national borders and so if you wanna actually study a whole system and the river joins two countries, you can't really share the data that comes

from one side of the river or with the people studying the other side of the river, it's a big problem. And in 2005, they invited me to, or 2004, they invited me to a meeting to prepare 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 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'll 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 interests 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 finally had a chance to meet with the organization responsible for the drafting, development and submission

of the EUPL, the European Public License. Many of you may know that over the past few years, the OSI has gone from what we would have called success to what Bill Joy in the past has 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 Bedale's talk this morning, he referenced a particular problem of combining Open Solaris with Debian 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 Debian 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, 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 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 we recognize at 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 folks from the IWC Committee responsible for interoperability in public administration to thank them for, number one, thinking about open source, right? 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 governments. But I mean that in the general sense. They just don't serve any useful function. 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 actions thereby informed were taken. And so in this iterative process, in this process of 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 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 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 I expect will be a positive result for both parties.

So this is cooperation the way we want to see it. 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 ministers in Asia who have watched and learned from the European model and are emulating by name or by reference those kinds of activities. Just this past week, 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 IT, and especially the software world.

They submitted to us a license for a set of fonts which will enable any Japanese citizen to legally interoperate with electronic forms from the Japanese government without the requirement of running proprietary monopoly 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 12,000 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 other countries are looking to positively join the open source community rather than merely adopt our terms and then conveniently ignore where they came from or what community principles were active.

What else do I wanna 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 nonprofit 501c3 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 OSOR. How many people have heard of the Open Source Observatory and Repository? So let me commend to you that OSOR.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 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 OSOR 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 organizing to extend or renew the charter of the OSOR 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 renew that work. So we wanted to make sure that they understood our deep appreciation that they're following our policies and respecting our community. We wanted to express our admiration for the great work they're doing on OSOR,

and we wanted to extend a hand of global cooperation and collaboration to take the best practices that we're learning from India, to take the needs that are developed and the opportunities that are evident in Africa, in Europe, in the Americas, north and south,

and around the world. 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 on schedule. That was gonna be delivered by Denise, by the way, so just 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? I have not introduced you, so you can introduce yourself, and then I'll talk about OSI goals.

There it is, thank you, Michael. Speaking to it, David, how are you? Taking everybody out for drinks later? Actually, that'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? You have to speak. Am I not speaking rightly enough? 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, going 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 OSI, 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 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 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 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. 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, and I think it's gonna continue to be a problematic for them in a way that allows us to continue to point out to them they need to work harder.

Originally, at the origination of the open source initiative, Eric Raymond spent 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 with the same voice and the same kind of frantic...

Condemnation. 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 as governments wanna become interested in open source, they don't wanna feel like they're dealing with a band of hooligans. They don't. They wanna 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 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 their first experience to be so hostile and negative. And so we changed over. 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. And in fact, quite the opposite. We spend a lot of time pointing out to them their many foibles, 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 or have come into open source software have done that. Sun notably did that, so that if you had a problem with Sun, you could contact Simon, and he would go try to figure it out. And IBM has had this, so has HP, so I'm trying to tell them, look, if you wanna make friends, you got the, first of all,

you got 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 putting a voice out for people. So that's one of the things that we've done is continue to pressure not only them. Another thing that happens is people come to us and ask for help,

and it's starting to happen outside the U.S. 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 too modest to talk about it, but there's some people in Japan. Oh, did you already?

In the past, we've done this mostly in the U.S., because that's mostly who was writing new licenses. But we know, as we're starting to talk to these countries that are interested now, the first thing they wanna do is write a license that's got their name in it, right? 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 to maintain a space where both kinds of goal can still exist. There are people in the free software movement 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. Ours is free, but if you guys wanna use it, that's okay. And that's like a fundamental choice that they've made that's different than the free software stance. A lot of free software people don't understand that stance. A lot of Apache people and BSD people

don't understand the free stance. We kinda try to sit in the middle and say there's room for both of these camps. This is all still open source. And actually the whole picture of software that you guys are used to using needs both of those camps because the good software is built in both camps. So for instance, Apache, the web,

would be a lot different without Apache. And Apache lives in that other camp. And so is all 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 wanna hear about me? Yes. It's not that interesting.

Worked for six years for Sun. 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 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 free Java even though we never really got it. 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. Just really fun. But it's an open source startup of course. And during the time that I worked for Sun, 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 begged 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, right? The early days of open source were like that 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. You know, companies have a hard time with this. 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 a different kind of money

than if you kept the software proprietary and screwed your customers. Right? So, okay, that's enough about me. You know everything you need to know now, right? Yeah? Good. Thank you Denise. Excellent. So the last part of this lightning talk 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 FASTEM 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 has 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 won. And our side won in the US case in particular because we had some pretty high powered legal help against a very wealthy 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, best 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 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 XLs in the audience. We have some in our family. My daughter plays with them. My daughter's first programming exercise was Christmas Day two years ago

when she modified the Guess the Number program much to her amazement to a more interesting game than one in 100. We've since had to modify Pong because we can't play with the default program. But make the paddle bigger. Make the, give ourselves some more balls and you know, we're good. We're good for an afternoon.

There's the education at the college and university level. This of course involves curriculum. This of course involves education about open source, community values. There is education for businesses, especially the sharing of best 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 FOSDEM, 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 had a great renaissance that has produced this generation but there's a shocking unawareness or a shocking taking for granted that we're seeing among really young people, especially in the US, 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 LSI wishes to engage that topic as best we can. We obviously spent, yes? About one third.

About one tenth. You can come up Andy, 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 the most junior developer technical position. And asking people, they'd pass my technical interview, you know, what do you use

when you've got two threads who are trying to modify or read the same piece of data and all 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's different about it than Windows other than, you know, the cosmetic things and 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, wow, 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 started working with Alolita 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 to 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 give a talk about what is open source software, why it's important, why these kinds of freedoms are important

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 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, you know, one third of you are under 30 but you're weird. I mean, you're at FOSDEM, 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 this area. Thanks, Andy.

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 gonna hurt

and how much of that's gonna be totally irrelevant to open source? I saw a proposal in the U.S. last month that suggested that the U.S. 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 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 gonna talk about this afternoon. And looking at how OSOR helps the European community and UNDP helps the world in terms of understanding the connection of technology and human progress. The ODF success story is an example

of successful engagement in the policy sphere. There's another topic which is the representational ability and the authority of the OSI. There are many people 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 not just the spirit

of open source, but all of its community members. And then finally, there's the topic of the governance of OSI, which relates to nominating the day-to-day work, attending board meetings, how we do fundraising, how we do PR, et cetera. So 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. Does somebody have a schedule where we're gonna be at two? We're gonna be somewhere, but not here.

And we're gonna be across the street. What's that? AW1-105. 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 exists 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 opensource.org website. We have the license, we call it license categories or license classification. Yes, 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, you know, retired. I see, I see.

Do you want to come up for us? Can everyone hear me? I'll stand up. I think that what this gentleman's looking for and he can certainly feel free to interrupt and correct me, but the Creative Commons has an end-by-end grid of licenses

where they said, okay, some people are gonna want to be attributed. They're gonna 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

with text that matches the license, the combination of license terms. They started from scratch. They started de novo. We started with the GBS, the BSD license. The LGPL. And those licenses don't get into any standardized grid.

So, specifically, no. The question is, is it feasible for us to push

in that direction of harmonized set of licenses where you choose independently, I want attribution, I don't want attribution. Yes and no. The issue of re-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 this 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. Russ, do you want to? Predicated classification, Simon Phipps says.

So, Simon has probably already looked at how we might be able to do this. It's the same question as before. To have them readable, you have to have a... So, I do know that both Hewlett-Packard

with their Phossology project is attempting to do machine classification of licensing schemes and building of metadata. I think Black Duck Software also builds 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 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 think that the community-oriented process of public commentary is absolutely essential to any credibility. So, I don't see us building a closed chamber environment where we make decisions that have not been informed by the community.

Yes, thank you. I think we can wrap up here. Thank you. In about 20 minutes, the real lightning talks will start, which are by definition 15 minutes. So, this was something off track. All right.