Simon Phipps is the new OSI President

The Open Source Initiative has announced that the Board has chosen new officers for a one year term and that Simon Phipps is the new President of the organisation. The appointment was made at the OSI meeting in Chicago over the weekend. Phipps told The H that his "focus for the year is to enable that transformation into an organisation fulfilling the first paragraph of OSI's mission and led by those it seeks to represent". That first paragraph reads

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation with global scope formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community.

Simon Phipps Phipps has already been spearheading an OSI reform process, working with the rest of the board to open up the organisation. That process has led to the creation of Open Source Initiative affiliation, bringing the Apache Software Foundation, FreeBSD, Eclipse, Mozilla, Debian, and Creative Commons, along with other organisations, on board as affiliates. "There will be further developments in that scheme soon, and we'll have much more to announce in other areas as the year progresses" said Phipps by email.

Phipps has also been instrumental in getting the OSI engaged in more community policy issues such as the Novell patent acquisition, where the organisation worked alongside the Free Software Foundation to make submissions to the European and US regulators.

Based in the United Kingdom, Phipps has previously worked at IBM, where he helped introduce Java and XML, and Sun Microsystems, where he became the Chief Open Source Officer, overseeing the transition of Java and other Sun properties to being licensed under OSI-approved licences. Since leaving Sun in 2010, he has been active in a number of advocacy and activist roles in the free software and open source communities.

(djwm)