Bradley M. Kuhn

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I Signed an OSI Board Agreement in Anticipation of Election Results

Friday 21 March 2025 by Bradley M. Kuhn

I ran in the “Affiliate district” in the 2025 election for Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) on a joint platform for OSI Reform with my colleague, Richard Fontana (who among other accomplishments, is currently Senior Commercial Counsel at IBM's Red Hat).

After voting closed, we received a strange request demanding that we sign the OSI's Board Agreement within 47 hours — and before we or anyone else (outside of OSI) were told the election results. This varies from all past elections in OSI's history, and instructions that 2025 candidates received in orientation. Fontana specifically verified with a question during orientation that candidates need not sign the Board Agreement unless/until we succeeded in the election and were a true candidate for a Directorship. Tracy Hinds, then chairperson of OSI's Board, confirmed this verbally for all candidates at the orientation. (And, that position is consistent with logic, since the OSI elections are purely advisory and its Board has discretion to ignore the election results in any event.

My and Fontana's platform had four planks — all of which called for reforms to OSI's status quo. The third plank . OSI acknowledged that they received a signed Board Agreement from both

Posted on Friday 21 March 2025 at 09:30 by Bradley M. Kuhn.

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