Open Source Initiative is an organization which has been founded to promote free software. OSI was founded by Bruce Perens and Eric Steven Raymond in February, 1998. At that time Netscape Communications Corporation published Netscape Communicator source code as free software because of the decline in profits and competition with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Eric Raymond was at the head of OSI beginning with its founding until February, 2005. Michael Tiemann is the incumbent president of the organization in question.
Being the public organization, OSI runs the project Open Source Definition. It reviews and approves licenses as OSD-Conformant. The organization takes an active part in Open Source community building and education.
The members of OSI Board go on travels around the world in order to visit Open Source Conferences and to see Open Source users and developers. Thus OSI Board members have also the possibility to discuss private and public issues with bodies of executive power. These issues have to do with Open Source technologies, licenses and development of models which can ensure economic and strategic benefits.
The initial period of the open-source movement concurred with the dot-com phenomenon that was booming in 1998-2000. At that time the computer operating system Linux enjoyed wide popularity. It was also the period of open-source-friendly companies foundation. The open source movement drew the mainstream software industry’s attention. This lead to open source software offerings, received from software companies, which included Corel (Corel Linux), Sun Microsystems (OpenOfficeorg), IBM (Open AFS). In 2001 when the dot-com era was booming, Open Source Initiative lived up the expectations of its advocates. Thus its activity was continued. The current status of OSI is “Active”. It is worth mentioning that open-source related movements of OSI include Iranian Free /Open Source users Community(Iran), MyOSS (Malaysia), IGOS (Indonesia) and Ma3bar (Arab Region).