OSI pauses 2026 board election cycle

[Posted January 28, 2026 by jzb]

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced that it will not be holding the 2026 spring board election. Instead, it will be creating a working group to "review and improve OSI's board member selection process" and provide recommendations by September 2026:

The public election process was designed to gather community priorities and improve board member selection, while final appointments remained with the board.

Over time, that nuance has become a source of understandable confusion for community members. Many reasonably expected elections to function as elections normally do, and in fact, the board has generally adopted the electorate's recommendations. When a process feels unclear, trust suffers. When trust suffers, engagement becomes harder. This is especially problematic for an organization whose mission depends on legitimacy and credibility. [...]

OSI tried its experiment for the right reasons, but a variety of factors resulted in "elections" that are performatively democratic while being gameable and representative of only a small group, and we've learned from the results. Now we are making space to align our director selection process with our bylaws, to rebuild trust, and to develop better, more durable and truly representative participation in which the global stakeholder community can be heard.

LWN covered the previous OSI election in March 2025.

to post comments

Sigh

Posted Jan 28, 2026 18:45 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (10 responses)

"We expected to be able to ignore the votes whenever we felt like it. People got upset that we did that, so now we're just not going to have votes at all."

Welp. Good to have the mask off. OSI has been broken for a while, and this is evidence that they are not going to accept attempts to be fixed.

Sigh

Posted Jan 28, 2026 18:47 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (9 responses)

Sorry, that was an uncharitable reaction, and I would edit it if I could.

> The board has established a Board Working Group to review and improve OSI’s board member selection process and stakeholder engagement mechanisms and to return with recommendations by September 2026.

*Hopefully*, this working group will come back with recommendations that *improve* the ability for people to effect change within OSI, whether by voting for those who represent directions or positions they want or by some other means of saying "we are not satisfied with the current direction/positions".

Sigh

Posted Jan 28, 2026 22:18 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (8 responses)

Sorry, that was an uncharitable reaction

I think it's understandable. OSI really set their public image on fire with the 2025 elections, which was about the worst thing for an organization with influence but no tangible power.

I'm unimpressed by their statement. I was particularly turned off by them calling electing a board "an experiment in non-profit governance". Debian has been holding real, binding elections for DPL for basically the whole time OSI has existed, and plenty of other FOSS groups have been doing it since well before OSI started holding advisory elections. There are plenty of models OSI could look to for inspiration.

Equally damning, it's taken them the better part of a year to decide it's time to do something. The sensible thing to do after the 2025 elections would have been to issue a mea culpa and immediately start looking into how to change their governing structure. That would show they had learned their lesson and wanted to do something to fix their problems, and they might have had a solution in place for the 2026 elections. Instead they waited until the next round of elections was coming up before even thinking about changing anything. It mostly looks like an excuse to cancel the elections rather than a serious reform effort.

*Hopefully*, this working group will come back with recommendations that *improve* the ability for people to effect change within OSI, whether by voting for those who represent directions or positions they want or by some other means of saying "we are not satisfied with the current direction/positions".

I'm not holding my breath. The OSI board gives the strong impression of wanting to look democratic while avoiding any accountability. Of course a dissatisfied public always has the final recourse of just ignoring them and paying attention to groups who actually put out code. If OSI disagrees with, say, Debian about whether a license is actually FOSS, I know who I'm going to listen to.

Sigh

Posted Jan 29, 2026 0:23 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> Of course a dissatisfied public always has the final recourse of just ignoring them and paying attention to groups who actually put out code.

Unfortunately, governments and regulators and large companies are less likely to do the same, and will be more likely to pay attention to OSI in that regard.

Also, leaving aside the problem of defending against bad licenses, ideally we'd be getting *positive* help *from* OSI in various legal and lobbying matters, rather than seeing them make things worse (e.g. with the "OSAID").

Sigh

Posted Jan 29, 2026 8:33 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

I dunno, I'm fan of Hanlon's razor: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence.

The OSI board is an unpaid position, these people have day jobs. In my experience on such boards, getting people together for a decision can take a while. These people are not being paid to take risks, so I can totally see them setting up something simple as a experiment with the best intentions. They don't want to be the ones who changed the bylaws and killed the organisation.

But I'm a glass-half-full kind of person.

Sigh

Posted Jan 29, 2026 12:25 UTC (Thu) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (1 responses)

> Equally damning, it's taken them the better part of a year to decide it's time to do something.

My experience with boards says this is an unfounded criticism. I might be more swayed by criticism of a fast decision as "equally damning, this was a rushed unthoughtful reactionary decision."

A nonprofit board is a group of part time volunteers, the best decisions are deliberative and thoughtful ones. There are 11 OSI board members which is quite large for a board and makes thoughtful deliberation even slower, and of course this is just one part of OSI's work. I hoped they would make some relevant decision before the next election so the timing overall makes sense to me.

Sigh

Posted Jan 30, 2026 8:36 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

You might have a point on a fast decision being damning if they weren't just talking about the decision that something has to be done and to explore options, not what exactly will ultimately be done.

Sigh

Posted Jan 29, 2026 12:42 UTC (Thu) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (3 responses)

> I was particularly turned off by them calling electing a board "an experiment in non-profit governance". Debian has been holding real, binding elections for DPL for basically the whole time OSI has existed, and plenty of other FOSS groups

DPL is different than a US non-profit board and if you could name any other FOSS related US 501 3(c) orgs that have board elections like OSI, I'd like to hear about them. When talking about common practices for U.S. 503(c) organizations, OSI's election system was unusual and that specific quote seems pretty reasonable to me.

Sigh

Posted Jan 29, 2026 12:51 UTC (Thu) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link]

Correcting myself: 501(c)(3)

Sigh

Posted Jan 29, 2026 17:59 UTC (Thu) by legoktm (subscriber, #111994) [Link]

The Wikimedia Foundation has (had) a similar system to OSI, in that there were some board seats selected by affiliates, some selected by the community at-large, and then some appointed by the board itself. Possibly unsurprisingly, this has had a number of issues and controversies over the years (disclaimer that I was a 2x candidate myself) and honestly the issues OSI is running through feels like it's just repeating the 2010s WMF issues. I don't remember the WMF ever outright cancelling an election, but it did switch around term limits to effectively do that. And multiple consultations/explorations on how to change the election process whenever something didn't go as expected (some with good outcomes, some...not as good).

Off the top of my head I'm not aware of any other major FOSS non-profits having a similar system, but I also don't feel it's that out of place, in that it's not that unusual to have dues paying members of an organization vote to elect leadership boards.

Sigh

Posted Jan 30, 2026 22:54 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

SPI does have elections. See <https://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/by-laws/> article 5.
In practice there are rarely more candidates than seat.

SPI has used the Condorcet Method to populate board seats

Posted Jan 29, 2026 21:25 UTC (Thu) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link]

When I was a member of the SPI (Software in the Public Interest) BoD a _long_ time ago (20+ years), we used Debian's voting software to decide Board membership. SPI members (all individual humans, mostly Debian developers) were the electorate.

It worked fine.

Maybe a more recent SPI board member could indicate whether the same mechanism is still in use.