Yesterday I wrote about the perils of diluting the OSI with corporate influence, and Michael Tiemann nicely captures an interesting way to expand the OSI's influence without ruining its integrity:The board of the Open Source Initiative has largely concluded that we have reached a point of organizational and contextual maturity. Namely, that open source has been defined, and a relatively large constituency of peo Yesterday I wrote about the perils of diluting the OSI with corporate influence, and Michael Tiemann nicely captures an interesting way to expand the OSI’s influence without ruining its integrity:The board of the Open Source Initiative has largely concluded that we have reached a point of organizational and contextual maturity. Namely, that open source has been defined, and a relatively large constituency of people have accepted that definition. So far, so good. What we have not done, however, is to make the OSI representative of that constituency. Yes, our board members have strong credentials as open source software developers, entrepreneurs, advocates, researchers, etc. But we cannot really claim that we are truly representative of the community, nor that we can truly speak for the community, other than the fact that each of us considers ourselves to be a small (very small) part of the community. There are others who identify themselves as members of the open source community (just as we do), who strongly believe that they better know how to protect and grow the open source movement, which includes greatly relaxing our standards for interpreting the OSD and allowing a great many more licenses to be approved. There are others who think that the OSD should specifically permit new and different ways that authors can control the use and distribution of their works. Etc. You may agree or disagree with these positions, but who gets to judge who is right? How are board members nominated and elected? How well does that process represent your position? We believe that one way to address this is to transform ourselves into some kind of membership (or other representative) organization. But what, precisely, should be the goal? And what should be the process? And how should it be done? And how can we protect ourselves if 50,000 people who want to destroy open source decide they want to join and vote us into the ground?The intention is clear: open up open source’s primary “lobby.” But the threat is also clear: open it up to those who would gladly reduce “open source” to lowest-common denominator snippet sharing? Michael suggests that we meet up at OSCON to tackle the issue. This is a good start, but the very groups who most want to challenge the OSI are those least likely to be at OSCON (the industry’s best open source developer conference). They’re not developers, in other words. They’re CEOs. Maybe they’re you? For those of us on the business side of open source, where would be a good place to meet, now that OSBC is behind us? Linuxworld? (Barring that, I’m happy to host you on the mountain this summer for mountain biking and open source discussion here in Utah.) Open Source