What's happening with SPI?

[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

What is Software in the Public Interest (SPI) up to these days, and does anybody care? If you're newish to the Linux Community, it wouldn't be surprising if you hadn't heard of SPI, though SPI and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) were big news back in 1998 when they were squabbling over the Open Source trademark.

SPI is a non-profit organization that acts as a kind of umbrella organization for Free Software projects like Debian, the Linux Standard Base and GNOME. SPI is a non-profit organization, and it accepts donations for the projects and holds the trademarks for supported projects that have them. SPI has two classes of membership, non-contributing and contributing. The only requirement for a non-contributing membership is a valid e-mail address, but it does not confer voting rights. Contributing membership is reserved for "people who are actively contributing to the free software community."

Recently SPI added three new members to its board of directors, Bruce Perens, John Goerzen, and Benjamin Mako Hill. Perens, who originally helped found SPI, left the organization in 1998 to work with the OSI and was part of the big dust up over the Open Source trademark. SPI board members are elected by contributing members of SPI.

Prior to the recent election, Perens said that the group was having problems making a quorum at board meetings. In fact, V.P. Martin Schulze resigned his position as V.P. because several other members were not donating enough time to their positions. Ean Schuessler is now V.P., and the position of president is still vacant after Nils Lohner stepped down last December.

Recently, there had also been some concerns about allocation of funds by SPI, but the new board passed a resolution to clarify how donations would be earmarked. SPI will also no longer be taking a five percent cut of donations for overhead, because it was not clear that part of a donation for a specific project, like Debian, would be going towards SPI.

For the most part, SPI's functions are pretty low-key. Perens says that SPI's function is basically to "handle funds well" for its organizations. According to Schulze, one of the things that SPI is currently working on is counting votes for the Open and Free Technology Community election, and working against "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent policies in several standards organizations.

Perens says that board is now making quorum at meetings and that things should go more smoothly in the future. "Can't say there's a ton of news. There used to be problems, but they're not problems anymore."