Open Source Initiative
Nonprofit founded February 1998 by Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens as steward of the Open Source Definition. Promotes open source as a pragmatic development methodology, distinct from the freedom-based framing of the Free Software Movement.
The "Open Source Initiative" (OSI) is a U.S. nonprofit founded in February 1998 by Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens, with early help from figures including Christine Peterson (who is credited with proposing the term "open source") and Jon Hall. It was created in the wake of the Netscape source release and the influence of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, with the explicit goal of branding collaborative software development for a business and engineering audience. OSI is the steward of the "Open Source Definition" (OSD), a ten-criterion standard adapted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. To qualify as open source under the OSD, a license must, among other things, provide access to source code and permit modification and redistribution — including for commercial use — without discriminating against fields of endeavor. The OSD covers both Copyleft licenses, which require derivative works to remain under the same terms, and permissive licenses, which do not. OSI maintains the list of OSI-approved licenses that most projects, package registries, and corporate legal teams rely on. Philosophically, OSI was positioned as the pragmatic counterpart to The Free Software Foundation: Stallman's Organization for Software Freedom and the broader Free Software Movement. Where Richard Stallman's framing treats software freedom as an ethical issue, OSI's framing pitches openness as a better engineering and business model. The two camps overlap substantially in practice — most OSD-compliant licenses also satisfy the Free Software Definition — but the rhetorical split has persisted. In recent years OSI has also worked on adjacent definitions, releasing version 1.0 of an "Open Source AI Definition" in late 2024.