Hello, hello. It's about time for our next talk, so if everyone could be a bit quiet and sit down a bit, I would like to introduce Simon Phipps as our next speaker. Simon wears a lot of hats, but today he is wearing the, well, he's not wearing a physical hat, but the virtual hat he's wearing is as a director of the Open Source Initiative,

and he has a very exciting announcement for us. And now he's wearing a beret. Thanks, Simon. Well, thank you all for giving up your lunch to come and listen to me. That's very kind of you. So this is actually the third time I've spoken at FOSDEM, I discovered to my surprise.

Last time that was notable was telling everybody that we'd persuaded the suits at Sun to make Java-free software. Since then, a lot has happened in the world, so I'm now unemployed,

available for consulting if you need an Open Source consultant. And it's never good to be unemployed and not do anything, so I've joined the Board of the Open Rights Group in the UK, and I'm helping them campaign against ACTA at the moment, which is, I believe, going to be our common cause for the next few months. And I'll take the hat off if

it's all right with you. And I've also been, for the last two years, on the Board of the Open Source Initiative. Now, being on the Board of the Open Source Initiative at a free software conference is often similar to, well, you know, pick an epithet of your own. It's often unpopular. One of the things I've got to explain to you, however, is that if you talk

to the folk at the Open Source Initiative, you discover to your, possibly to your surprise, that everyone on the Board of OSI is committed to software freedom. And real, crunchy software freedom, you know, not some diluted form that's there to do something cunning. Real, crunchy software freedom. Now, let me explain where OSI came from. The idea of free

software had been around for a long time, come the end of the 1990s, and it became increasingly apparent to a lot of people that it was necessary to help corporations embrace free

software. And the only help that many corporations were getting in embracing free software was having people show up and shout at them for not doing free software, and telling them how unethical they were, and telling them how bad and evil they were. Now, the truth is that corporations are indeed evil. I mean, there's no doubt about it, but let me tell you a story

about this crocodile. See, I've met this crocodile. This crocodile is in a crocodile farm in Australia, and he gives a number of shows each day. He's actually got a friend, this guy here, who looks a little bit like Steve Irwin. He is not a soft guy. He is very

happy to pick up Australian snakes and wave them around. And they're real snakes with real teeth. And so this guy gives shows with crocodiles. And when I say he gives shows with crocodiles, I don't mean he points to them in the tank. I mean he gets in there

and gives shows with crocodiles. And these, again, are real crocodiles that really eat things. So now he gives his show in there, and he shows you what a crocodile is like. He shows you a pool of water, smaller at this stage, and he's kind of a little

chicken on a stick, a whole chicken on a piece of string on a stick, and holds it over the pool and taps the water with it. And a crocodile comes up and eats the

chicken. This is just by way of proving that it's a real crocodile. So at the end of the show, he does a Q&A, as everyone does, and you see he and the crocodile both do the Q&A at the end of the show. And somebody asks him whether he knows this crocodile, whether he's got a relationship with this crocodile, whether working with him means they have an empathy. And he

says, you know, don't be stupid sport, it's a crocodile. You don't have empathy with crocodiles. Crocodiles don't have a personality, they are reptiles. They respond to fear and they respond to hunger. And if

they're afraid of something, then they act, and if they're hungry they act, and if they're neither, they sit and join in the Q&A with the audience. Now you can see all the time, I did a close-up here, you can see all the time he's doing this talk, that crocodile is sitting there running a computation about how

fast the guy can run, how much nutrition there is in the foot, it's going the whole time, okay? So you should never believe if you're going to deal with a crocodile that you can talk it round to your point of view. Because honestly you can't, it's a crocodile, it's a bloody reptile mate. You can't talk

it round to your point of view. So, you know, if you are wanting to talk a crocodile around, what you actually need is someone who looks a bit like Steve Irwin, somebody who understands crocodiles, somebody who knows that you don't talk ethics to crocodiles, you don't talk morality to

crocodiles, what you do is you throw crocodiles chickens. And so this is where the Open Source Initiative came from. The Open Source Initiative came from a deep understanding by a group of very smart people that corporations are

reptiles, and that the value to them of software freedom is not ethical. The value to them of software freedom is to do with the four freedoms. This is my paraphrase of the four freedoms that makes it simpler for people. Corporations need those liberties, they need the freedom to use, study,

modify and distribute software, but they don't care that it's ethical because they're reptiles. Corporations don't have ethics, people have ethics. What makes a corporation ethical is the people in it behaving ethically.

Corporations just have processes and budgets and bottom lines and shareholders. So we could see back in 1998 that if we were going to help corporations embrace free software, which seemed to be a profoundly important thing to do as Microsoft were in the process of killing off Netscape and killing off the browser we were all using, we felt that we had to come up

with a way of talking about it that emphasized the pragmatic values rather than trying to talk morality to crocodiles. And so that is where OSI came from in 1998. It was about pragmatic software freedom to leverage corporate involvement. It de-emphasized the ethical imperative, but that didn't

mean it wasn't there. It meant that it wasn't, there was no point in talking about it to the target audience because they would just think that you are some kind of crazy radical and stop listening to you. And so OSI focused on practicalities, it focused on education, on educating people about open source

as a development methodology, it focused on licensing, it focused on building understanding. And so in the last decade what OSI has done is focused on licensing. It came up with the open source definition, a definition of

what attributes a license had to have if it was going to deliver the four freedoms to people who received software under that license. That's what the open source definition does, it defines how a license can deliver on software freedom. It was such a successful idea that we had over 60 different people decide that they wanted to submit licenses for approval.

License proliferation was an unfortunate sign of success. Sometimes when you succeed things happen that you weren't anticipating. And we ended up with lots of licenses and so we spent some time categorizing them and creating a canonical listing of licenses. If you go to the OSI website today you'll

find a list of licenses and right at the top are a set of licenses that it's a good idea to use and down below the fold there's a long list of licenses that it's really not a very good idea to use. And most corporate folks get the idea when they see the list that you should really only use the ones at the top and there's not very many of them. So in the last

decade OSI has become the owner of a brand that is incredibly powerful. Open source has become the default for software. In particular OSI has become the standard for open sourcing government. Governments around the world use OSI's

list of open source licenses as the benchmark for whether software is open source or not. And that's led to a loss of fear. The fear of software freedom, the fear of free software has gradually diminished. It has become common thinking for corporations to want open source software to the point

where the fud-making lawyers who say the GPL is dangerous, who's even a previous speaker who is a passionate guy about the GPL still goes around pretending the GPL is dangerous. It's not dangerous. It's no more dangerous than the Microsoft end-user license agreement. Microsoft end-user license agreement is more dangerous actually because if you drop it you can break

your foot. GPL isn't that heavy. So as a corporation the way you manage the GPL is using the same process you manage all your other licensing arrangements. It's not hard. So fear has gone. There is a certain uniformity to

open source and free software usage. And interestingly the term is being used elsewhere. I got an email yesterday. I subscribed to my member of parliament. I don't know if you do. I subscribed to my member of parliament in the UK using a system called they work for you which I thoroughly recommend to you. So a free software project written by some great activists at my society. And

so I get an email every time my MP stands up and talks in Parliament in the UK. And one of the things he said yesterday was he talked about how the energy policy in the UK is being they're using a wiki to develop the energy policy using an open source policy making process. Now that term has become

an indicator of inclusiveness. It's become an indicator of citizen engagement. It's become an indication that there is no hidden controlling entity. And so the term open source has succeeded wildly. The market has been

established and open source is the norm. It would be tempting if I was George Bush to find an aircraft carrier and put a banner up on it. Now we've things have changed though over the last decade. One of the things that's changed is educated people have realized that they can't leave the revolution to the

radicals. We've begun to see the Occupy movement. We've begun to see people realizing that copyright absolutism is a massive threat to our liberty and culture. And we've begun to see people realizing that they can't trust politicians to do anything about it. They've got to stand up and start

talking about it. They've discovered that the government is run by lobbyists and that they don't have one. And so they've started being their own lobbyists. So this was the Occupy camp in San Francisco got moved on from the park. This was them walking up through the center of San Francisco. Naturally

they're all being protected by these police officers here. There was a very large number of police officers protecting them, I noticed, from the huge rabble of people with cameras curing and supporting them. So we're in a new decade. Open source is the default. Digital liberty is moving to center

stage. Government by lobbyists needs challenging. OSI was tired. It was irrelevant because everyone was now using the term open source and no one cared anymore. I've been talking to people in this process of reforming OSI about joining in and one of the organizations I spoke to said they

couldn't be bothered to join because OSI was irrelevant. Which is a little ironic because what I was offering them was the opportunity to change it into something that wasn't irrelevant anymore. So what we have decided to do at OSI is to move beyond licensing and to turn OSI and the open source

brand over to the people. It's about time. OSI has been run by a board of 10 people for the last 12 years, actually 14 years. It's about time it became a member-led organization. So we're going to reinvigorate it with member-based governance. Now this is interesting because we have to include all the

stakeholders in the process. We really can't afford to exclude anybody. So that means that we have to include, yes, the obvious stakeholders, open source organizations. We also have to include government organizations and government bodies. We have to include competency centers. We have to include corporations

somehow. And how do we do that? How do we work out how to include all the stakeholders without the risk of those stakeholders who typically have got very well-funded lobbyists as we observed in the previous slide from taking over the ship. So the process that we've decided on is to first of all get a

a college of extremely trustworthy parties together to guide OSI's governance. So today I'm announcing that OSI has got a new group of affiliates who form the governance backbone of the new OSI. And I'm also announcing that

today we have an open call for nonprofit organizations to affiliate with OSI. So if you are part of the leadership of an open source organization, an open source project, I'd like to hear from you about joining OSI. And our next stage is then to get that college of wisdom that we have

created to help us form organizations that can embrace government entities. So I hope we'll see European government entities that are doing open source joining in and also organizations that are a bit tricky to include in rules. Give you an example of one of those. Oregon State University has got an open

source lab which is fantastic. We all love them. We all host our projects there. OSI hosts code there. And the problem is that they aren't an entity. They're just a project of Oregon State University. So how do we include them in governance? Do we give the the Chancellor of Oregon State

University a role in our governance? Or do we give the people working on the project involvement in the governance? But if we do, what do our rules say about them and about how they were identified? So we've got some difficult problems to solve, but today I'm pleased to say we've got 12 organizations that

certainly a subset of those organizations we all trust. Some of us may have questions about some of them for one reason or another, but they are all a group of organizations that we can decide that we do trust with open source. And those 12 organizations have agreed to form the initial affiliates of

OSI and starting Monday will be helping us with making governance decisions. During March they will be selecting somebody to join the OSI board so the OSI board will begin to be elected by members starting this month. And going forward we anticipate that the whole OSI board will be elected by OSI's

membership. Then during the second quarter we intend to launch a personal associate scheme to allow individuals to join OSI. And those personal associates will probably, with the consent of the current affiliates, be able to elect a representative to the board of directors and gain a set of benefits

such as email addresses and a big happy smile. During third quarter we anticipate that there will be some corporate patrons joining. Those corporate patrons will probably not be initially involved in governance, but once the organization is established we anticipate that we may be able to let

those corporate associates also have a seat on the board of directors. The majority of the directors will always be elected by the affiliate membership, that is the nonprofit college of open source projects. When it comes to that personal associate scheme, OSI needs your input.

Oh, look, my URL has gone from the bottom of the screen, so you'll just have to note down the long URL that's up there. We've created a survey to try and understand what you would like to receive in the form of OSI membership. So please go to that URL, complete the survey, and let us know

what benefits you want, what membership fee is appropriate, if any, what role in governance you would like to have, and other information that will be fed into that process of defining OSI's membership. We are going to switch over to bottom-up governance. For the last 13, 14 years, OSI has been a

board-only entity. It's been run by a group of directors who select their successors. There has been very little in the way of transparency and very little in the way of openness, paradoxically. That was necessary in a

lot of ways. It was the only way that the founders of OSI could see to bring about the radical change that was needed to make OSI happen, make open source happen everywhere. But we don't need that anymore. Everyone does open source, so everyone ought to get a say in what open source means for the world. So we're going to be moving to a member-led governance where members

will decide how OSI will operate, where members will create OSI's initiatives. We're launching an initiative today, which is on my next slide, as a sample of the work that we think that the membership at OSI could do. We hope

people will use OSI as a policy venue. We've been testing whether OSI has a reputation with legislators that is worth exploiting. So last spring, I don't know if you heard, but a group of companies was trying to buy Novell's patent portfolio. That group of companies involved four companies that very few people in this room would trust even individually, let alone as a

group of four companies buying a mainly open-source focused patent portfolio. So OSI wrote a position paper indicating what a problem this was, and OSI then got in touch with the Free Software Foundation, and together OSI and FSF sent that position paper to the US government and

to the German government, and we successfully led those two governments to review Novell's patent portfolio and its acquisition and to set terms that would prevent it being used against open source. We found we were able to do that remarkably quickly. We were able to do it with very little

question. We had the authority to do that. OSI and FSF together had the authority in the eyes of the German and US governments to raise questions about open source, and so we believe that that is a powerful position. We believe that software freedom, that digital liberty has got a posse, and we

want to create a venue where that posse can come together and tell governments what is wrong with their crazy policies around copyrights and patents. So OSI will become a policy venue where groups of people can create policy statements and with the approval of the elected board put them forward to governments and institutions as the view of open

source. The board will facilitate those actions with the lightest possible touch. It will no longer be the only group doing the work. It will represent the members and be elected by them, and its main function is to prevent regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is where the

crocodile that you were trying to keep in the pen becomes the guy giving the show, and we'll also try and prevent policy drift. Policy drift is something you see in quite a few open source communities that have got a high level of democracy. It's where you have a different policy each week depending on who has the microphone. We don't want either

of those things to happen, so the board is there to prevent regulatory capture and to prevent policy drift, but otherwise it's up to the membership to do things. So if you'd like to get involved in that sort of thing now, we've created a project called the Free Libra and Open Source Software Body of Knowledge. The Flosbok is intended to be a resource for educators who are creating a curriculum

in higher education teaching open source, and we would very much welcome your involvement in creating that body of knowledge so that we can have a formal academic body of knowledge that can raise the level of education about Free Libra and Open Source Software. That's

steps. We are going to carry on with our membership category creation. It's likely that come the end of 2012 we'll have such a large administrative burden that we will need to have a very small assistant staff looking after membership, so for that we will

probably need some funds, and we've been thinking hard about how to raise a small amount of funding without the risk of giving control to the parties who would like to control us. See, there are a few corporations who would be very pleased to give us all the money we need to hire all the staff we want. The risk

of doing that is they then get to tell you that they'll stop giving you funds if you don't do what they ask, and we're not willing to run the risk of that control, so we want to spread the cost burden over all of our membership categories, which is why there probably will be membership fees for corporates and individuals, and we'll be asking for voluntary donations from affiliates. That's not set in

stone yet, though. There's still plenty of time to influence the direction that that takes. The full board has been put on notice that they have term-limited membership of the board, so my term is I have another four years to run on my board term. We have board

members who are resigning or retiring this year, creating vacancies. By 2015, we will have a board that is fully elected by the membership, and so by then we expect to change the bylaws of OSI to set in stone whatever the membership invents over the next two years. When it

comes to dealing with crocodiles, the best way to deal with crocodiles is with trained staff. By trained staff in the world of open source, what we really mean is you. You're the people who probably have or will have jobs in corporations, corporations with no ethics and

no morals, just with balance sheets, and they will need you, your heart, your soul, your ethics, and your morality to make them act in a way that is for the general good. And so therefore, I believe that it's very important that we make OSI into something strong. We thought about killing it. We thought about trying to dock its mission with some other organization, but we

realized that the term open source and the list of licenses was actually, had too much of a life for us to just kill it off. So the alternative was to give it a purpose, to make something good out of it. And so we want to turn all of you into crocodile trainers. Hopefully none of you will get eaten in the process.

Ask your project to join OSI. Complete our survey. There's the short URL up there. Join in with Flosbok. Ask me questions. Send me email telling me that I'm crazy and that I'm completely wrong so that I know before I make final decisions. But please join in because I believe that the world needs a body of

educated digital liberty activists who are passionate about software freedom and who are able to use corporations to make the world a free digital place. Thank you very much. By my calculation, I have three

minutes left. If you would like to ask a question, there is a microphone there and there and here. Please go to a microphone and ask your question. Otherwise, I will stand and look attractive.

Sah. Is it correct that OSI doesn't have the trademark

for open source? So the question here is, is it correct that OSI doesn't have the trademark for open source? That's correct. OSI has the trademark for that green circle up there. Okay. What OSI does have is as a result of 14 years of existence, a moral authority

around the term open source that means that when people want to know what it means, they tend to come to OSI. And so we found that without having the trademark, we've still been able to cause people to cease and desist from abusing the term open source simply by growling at them. Thank you. Well, I'm

pleased that you find it good to look at me looking attractive. That's good. Thank you very much for listening and now the real speaker will be along in a minute.