For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.
Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.
In February, the License-Discuss mailing list discussed the OSD and compulsory user reporting, the delisting of licenses, the MIT-Clone and conern on the copyright notice, GDPR/CCPA and the Cryptographic Autonomy License (Beta 4), the CERN Open Hardware License 2.0, Ethical Open Source Licensing – Persona non Grata Preamble, Fairness vs Mission Objectives of the OSI, ethical open source licensing - Dual Licensing for Justice, discouraging governments from creating bespoke licenses, and the psychological relationship between an author and the work.
We’d like to update you on some work we have underway on improving the OSI’s work on reviewing open source licenses. We’re working on two initiatives, one substantive and one process.
PALO ALTO, Calif., June 30, 2025 -- The Open Source Initiative® (OSI), the internationally recognized steward of the Open Source Definition and open source licenses, is excited to announce the Affiliate Membership of OASIS Open, a global nonprofit consortium managing a broad technical agenda encompassing cybersecurity, blockchain, privacy, cryptography, cloud computing, IoT, urban mobility, emergency management, and other content technologies.
The Open Source Initiative would like to congratulate the GNOME Foundation on its recent settlement of the patent lawsuit alleging that the Shotwell software infringed patents owned by Rothschild Patent Imaging. The settlement was a huge achievement -- not only did GNOME pay nothing, but Rothschild Patent Imaging and its owner, Leigh M. Rothschild, have agreed that, for all of their patents and future patents, they will not sue any user or developer of software under an Open Source Initiative-approved license (and their updated versions) where the software forms a material part of the infringement allegation. That is freedom from suit for the open source software world for over 100 patents.
The State of the Source Summit invites open source communities of practice from around the world to organize and contribute to a global conversation on the current state of open source software: non-technical issues that foster development and community, the licenses that enable collaboration, the practices that promote contribution, and the issues confronting cooperation.