The open source AI definition has become a hot-button issue in the Open Source Initiative’s forthcoming board election.
The OSI’s 2025 Board of Directors election has become embroiled in controversy. While much of the spotlight has been on the OSI’s election processes, the real issue is the community’s opposition to the open source AI definition (OSAID), which the organization released last October.
Here’s the background: the OSI is set to vote on three board seats in March. The OSI board is made up of four directors elected by OSI individual members for two-year terms; four directors elected by OSI affiliate members for three-year terms; and four directors appointed for two-year terms by the board itself. Once elected, the board oversees the organization, approves its budget, and supports the executive director and staff in fulfilling its mission.
In the 2025 election, two seats will be filled by individual members, while one will be elected by affiliate organizations. However, the election process has been criticized because the OSI has refused to accept the candidacy of Debian developer Luke Faraone, citing a missed application deadline.
Faraone claims they submitted their application around 9 p.m. PST on Feb. 17, while the OSI maintains the deadline was 11:59 p.m. UTC (3:59 p.m. PST) on the same day. The dispute has raised a firestorm about the clarity of communication regarding deadlines and time zones.
Critics argue that the deadline’s time zone was not clearly specified on the OSI’s public-facing website. Tracy Hinds, chair of OSI, acknowledged this oversight but stated that full members received multiple emails with the correct time zone information.
“Everyone who is qualified to run for elections (full members of OSI) received emails with the time zone,” wrote Hinds, in an email to The New Stack. “The public-facing web page did not have the time zone, and we’ve now updated it for clarity going forward. Extending the deadline would be unfair to the other candidates.
“Differing points of view will be well represented in the slate. We appreciate the opportunity to improve our processes, and we’re looking forward to the next steps in the election for our community.”
Faraone, who previously worked at Dropbox and Google, expressed on their personal blog that their views on OSI’s open source AI definition are similar to that of Bradley Kuhn, who is running for the OSI board on a platform opposing the definition. (Faraone did not respond to efforts by The New Stack to contact them for comment.)
Debate Over Open Source AI
The OSI has faced calls to reconsider its decision about Faraone.
On LinkedIn, Sam Johnston, founder of the Open Source Alliance (OSA), wrote, Faraone “was denied their rightful place on the ballot on the basis that they missed an ‘arbitrary and capricious’ deadline that was never published — midday UTC for a California corporation?! This is clown-car level corporate governance, and the OSI board must give their members the choice to vote for Luke Faraone for the result to be in any way valid.”
Johnston later added in an online instant message to The New Stack, once the OSI ballot was announced, this decision was “irrevocably invalidating yet another election.”
He’s not the only one who strongly objects to Faraone being left off the ballot. Also on LinkedIn, Bruce Perens, one of the OSI’s founders wrote, “Open Source Initiative invents rule at the last minute to deny opposition candidate’s nomination for their board election.”
Be that as it may, Faraone isn’t on the ballot. As heated as the conversation has become over this matter, it’s a side issue. The broader debate within the open source community is whether the OSAID is the right definition for open source AI — and whether open source AI should be defined at all.
True, some organizations such as the Mozilla Foundation, the OpenInfra Foundation, Bloomberg Engineering, and SUSE have endorsed the OSAID. Other important open source companies, however, like Red Hat, have yet to say if they’ll support it or not.
Mega companies, like Meta with its Llama Large Language Model (LLM), are trying to set its own open source AI definition to further its own business purposes. A Meta spokesperson told TNS, “There is no single open source AI definition, and defining it is a challenge because previous open source definitions do not encompass the complexities of today’s rapidly advancing AI models.”
More to the point, within the open source community, there are strong objections to the OSIAD. Two well-known figures in the open source world — Richard Fontana, Red Hat’s principal commercial counsel and a former OSI board member, and Kuhn, policy fellow and hacker-in-residence at the Software Freedom Conservancy — are running on a joint platform of repealing the OSAID.
The two declare in their policy statement that they’ll “endeavor to persuade the OSI to acknowledge this error and repeal OSAID. We are not dogmatic on this point; we are open to a compromise that recharacterizes the elements of OSAID as a nonbinding and preliminary set of recommendations.”
A Proposal: ‘5 or 10 Years’ of Further Study
If you’re expecting them to come up with a quick resolution to the open source AI definition, though, you’ve come to the wrong candidates. Fontana and Kuhn declare in their policy statement that the “OSI should also commit to a substantial period of time for careful study and ongoing community discussion — perhaps as long as 5 or 10 years — before adoption of a formal definition of ‘Open Source AI.’”
The OSAID was released after roughly three years of community meetings and discussions, including a global road trip to hold workshops meant to gather input.
For the most part, other candidates have not taken a public OSAID stance. Two of them have, however, taken pro-OSAID positions: Casey Valk, Nutanix‘s senior manager for open source program management, and Rasim Sen, founder of the blockchain consultancy, zero2hero, who worked on the OSAID. Both want to help evolve the OSAID definition so that it can become the universally accepted open source AI definition.
Despite the controversies, the OSI is moving forward with its election process. Voting will begin on Friday, and close on March 17.
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