April 1st, 2005
Open Source Initiative Board takes shape
Danese Cooper, the open source diva who recently left Sun to join Intel, and who is also an officer at the Open Source Initiative, is spreading the word that the OSI has announced a new board. According to her new blog (she had an old one), joining her and acting president Michael Tiemann as board members are Ken Coar, Russ Nelson, Bruno Souza, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Sanjiva Weewarana, and Joi Ito. When the OSI first started restructuring, one of the organization’s goals was to recruit a much more diverse board of directors than in any of the board’s previous instantiations. Cooper said the OSI was seeking diversity not just in terms of the number of software sectors that were represented, but also in international composition. Against that goal, the OSI appears to be fairing pretty well.
One of the first orders of business for the new board, according to Cooper, will be to tackle the open source license proliferation issue — an issue that Cooper said would be discussed by the group at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference (she welcomes other participants).
The OSI, however, is still in the midst of an executive search for a permanent president. Michael Tiemann, who is also vice-president of open source affairs at Red Hat, is filling in until the organization can recruit a more seasoned executive who is "presidential material," doesn’t invite controversy because of any conflicts of interest, and has the business savvy to not only help the OSI maintain its relevance, but to expand that relevance to the business community (arguably, the community that’s most in need of guidance from some open source authority).
Not that she’d take the job, but, off the top of my head, few people qualify for the job as well as SpikeSource CEO Kim Polese does. Of any open source company out there, few companies come as close to being the Switzerland of open source as SpikeSource. In a recent interview, Polese told me how SpikeSource intends to serve businesses that run open source software as well as vendors that distribute it or that make software to run on it. For SpikeSource to succeed, neutrality will have to be in its genes (and it is).
Proof of whether SpikeSource and Polese are getting a vote of confidence from the software community should be apparent when the company emerges from beta later this month and announces several important ISV partnerships in the process. Polese will be in the thick of an open source world where open source vendors are trying to address end-user needs, as SpikeSource serves both constituencies (perfect for the resume of any OSI president). Also, Polese is as sharp as they come on the business front (a must have for the next OSI president). In addition to displaying a keen understanding of open source issues during my interview, she was all business when it came to her discussion of those issues with her buttoned-down, well-articulated, and concise answers (her days at Marimba have clearly contributed to her seasoning as a executive).
Finally, there may be those in the open source community who will ask "Kim Polese? Kim who?" Indeed, Polese is not nearly the celebrity that some of the other board members are in open source circles. But, bringing someone like Polese on is exactly the sort of fresh outsider approach that the OSI needs in order to clean out its cobwebs and build a 21st century organization.
