Sad I am glad I didn't pay OSI to vote [LWN.net]

Sad I am glad I didn't pay OSI to vote

Posted Mar 21, 2025 22:48 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740)
Parent article: OSI election ends with unsatisfying results

I wanted to pay OSI to be able to vote, so I could show my support for the reform candidates. Because I liked their platform and thought it would be a good thing for OSI. In the end I decided not to because I was afraid they wouldn't accept their nomination and I wouldn't have a chance to vote for them.

Turns out it would have been even worse. They did indeed not accept one of the nominees on a IMHO bogus technicality, but at least did accepted the nomination of two others. Knowing full well that one point of their platform was "Remove “code of silence” from Board Member Agreement" and another was "Directors should be allowed to use FOSS for Board activities".

Then after the vote closed they added a requirement the candidates use a proprietary app to sign the Board Member Agreement (including those 5 words they had campaigned to change). And even though they did return the signed agreements (not using the proprietary app and with a note added about their campaign promise) they still refused to tally the votes these candidates got...

So even when people would have paid OSI to vote for (some of) them, they then didn't got to see how much support they had.

Maybe they wouldn't have won, or maybe the OSI board would have rejected their board appointment after the vote. But it would certainly have been interesting to see how much support their OSI reform platform would have gotten.

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Sad I am glad I didn't pay OSI to vote

Posted Mar 24, 2025 12:12 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Exactly. Appearances matter in this area, and this frankly reeks of corruption. It doesn't matter that it might be mere incompetence, it *looks* like what a corrupt organization trying to ignore votes would do if it cared so little about appearances that it didn't even need to try to appear non-corrupt. (Of course, OSI is not actually in that position, which makes me suspect incompetence instead -- but honestly even the "votes are advisory" thing is an appalling clause that should be struck straight out. The presence of continuing directors is quite enough.)