I have been accepted as a candidate to be elected to the Board of the Open Source Initiative under the Individual Members category. If you are a member of the Open Source Initiative, I would be delighted if you would cast your vote in my favour.

Why am I running?

As noted on my candidate page, I think it is important that I step up and help drive this globally significant organisation because of what open source implies for all of us.

The collective we, have spent over 27 years carrying, living and explaining the ethos and policies and ideas behind the making available the source code that runs our societies. Access to these codes is foundationally important because as everything around us gets digitised and digitalised, we risk the loss of control if the building blocks are not available to those coming after us. We owe it to our future generations the full access and gamut of skills that comes with that for them to move forward to benefit all.

We are also at an inflection point with the rapid uptake of augmented/artificial intelligence software systems. I first got involved with AI in graduate school at Oregon State University in the late 1980s. It was all about Lisp, Prolog, autonomous agents, early days of vision and expert systems. It was not exciting to me then and I moved on to chip design (MOSIS et al). But as software became the glue that makes these pieces of hardware function and when the ARPAnet transformed into the Internet, my focus and interest moved into the software realm but continuing to be anchored in hardware all the time.

Fast forward to this century, and the over two decade of investments in undersea cables, satellite systems, we are now a globally enabled collective that needs guidance and thought leadership so that no one is left behind.

Full and unfettered access to software source code makes that real and we have seen it already in how we have consumed and contributed back to the growth of technology adoption across the planet.

As noted earlier, with the hype and bluster around AI, we cannot have the tools that make those be hidden from public view and engagement.

The Open Source AI Definition v1 was released last year by the OSI. It does address a lot of the concerns around full access to training data and model code, but it does not go far enough especially with the training data. Yes, there are challenges in training data: how do we manage privacy of data, confidential of some of those data etc.

OSAID v1, in my humble opinion, is weak on that portion. A lot of virtual ink has been spilled on the pros and cons of that version, and I want to be at the driver’s seat, as an elected board member of the Open Source Initiative, to make sure that both the form and intent of the four freedoms of Free Software as defined by the Open Source Definition is undeniably etched into the next version OSAID.

So, if you are member of the Open Source Initiative, I hope you would vote me in.