Bradley M. Kuhn

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I Signed an OSI Board Agreement in Anticipation of Election Results

Wednesday 19 March 2025 by Bradley M. Kuhn

Update 2025-03-21: During the 2025 Open Source Initiative I used my blog as a campaigning tool (for reasons discussed below) before I knew how much interest there would ultimately be in the FOSS community about the 2025 OSI Board of Directors election. Since this was used as a source for the LWN article, keeping the original record easy to find is obviously important and folks shouldn't have to go to archive.org/web to find it. Nevertheless, if you're just digging into this story fresh, I don't really recommend reading the below. Instead, I suggest just reading Brockmeier's LWN article because he's a journalist and writes better and more concise than me, and he's unbiased and the below is my (understandably) biased view as a candidate who lived through this problematic election.

An Update Regarding the 2025 Open Source Initiative Elections

I've explained in other posts that I ran for the 2025 Open Source Initative Board of Directors in the “Affiliate” district.

Voting closed on MON 2025-03-17 at 10:00 US/Pacific. One hour later, candidates were surprised to receive an email from OSI demanding that all candidates sign a Board agreement before results were posted. This was surprising because during mandatory orientation, candidates were told the opposite: that a Board agreement need not be signed until the Board formally appointed you as a Director (as the elections are only advisory &mdash: OSI's Board need not follow election results in any event. It was also surprising because the deadline was a mere 47 hours later (WED 2025-03-19 at 10:00 US/Pacific).

Many of us candidates attempted to get clarification over the last 46 hours, but OSI has not communicated clear answers in response to those requests. Based on these unclear responses, the best we can surmise is that OSI intends to modify the ballots cast by Affiliates and Members to remove any candidate who misses this new deadline. We are loathe to assume the worst, but there's little choice given the confusing responses and surprising change in requirements and deadlines.

So, I decided to sign a Board Agreement with OSI. Here is the PDF that I just submitted to the OSI. I emailed it to OSI instead. OSI did recommend DocuSign, but I refuse to use proprietary software for my FOSS volunteer work on moral and ethical grounds⁰ (see my two keynotes (FOSDEM 2019, FOSDEM 2020) (co-presented with Karen Sandler) on this subject for more info on that).

My running mate on the Shared Platform for OSI Reform, Richard Fontana, also signed a Board Agreement with OSI before the deadline as well.

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⁰ Chad Whitacre has made unfair criticism of my refusal tog use Docusign as part of the (apparently ongoing?) 2025 OSI Board election political campaign. I respond to his comment here in this footnote (& further discussion is welcome using the fediverse, AGPLv3-powered comment feature of my blog). I've put it in this footnote because Chad is not actually raising an issue about this blog post's primary content, but instead attempting to reopen the debate about Item 4 in the Shared Platform for OSI Reform. My response follows:

In addition to the two keynotes mentioned above, I propose these analogies that really are apt to this situation:

• Imagine if the Board of The Nature Conservancy told Directors they would be required, if elected, to use a car service to attend Board meetings. It's easier, they argue, if everyone uses the same service and that way, we know you're on your way, and we pay a group rate anyway. Some candidates for open Board seats retort that's not environmentally sound, and insist — not even that other Board members must stop using the car service &mdash: but just that Directors who chose should be allowed to simply take public transit to the Board meeting — even though it might make them about five minutes late to the meeting. Are these Director candidates engaged in “passive-aggressive politicking”?
• Imagine if the Board of Friends of Trees made a decision that all paperwork for the organization be printed on non-recycled paper made from freshly cut tree wood pulp. That paper is easier to move around, they say — and it's easier to read what's printed because of its quality. Some candidates for open Board seats run on a platform that says Board members should be allowed to get their print-outs on 100% post-consumer recycled paper for Board meetings. These candidates don't insist that other Board members use the same paper, so, if these new Directors are seated, this will create extra work for staff because now they have to do two sets of print-outs to prep for Board meetings, and refill the machine with different paper in-between. Are these new Director candidates, when they speak up about why this position is important to them as a moral issue, a “a distracting waste of time”?
• Imagine if the Board of the APSCA made the decision that Directors must work through lunch, and the majority of the Directors vote that they'll get delivery from a restaurant that serves no vegan food whatsoever. Is it reasonable for this to be a non-negotiable requirement — such that the other Directors must work through lunch and just stay hungry? Or should they add a second restaurant option for the minority? After all, the ASPCA condemns animal cruelty but doesn't go so far as to demand that everyone also be a vegan. Would the meat-eating directors then say something like “opposing cruelty to animals could be so much more than merely being vegan” to these other Directors?

Posted on Wednesday 19 March 2025 at 08:59 by Bradley M. Kuhn.

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