The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has finally named its first Executive Director, Stefano Maffulli. ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports: Maffulli is a long-time developer community manager. He co-founded and led the Italian chapter of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) from 2001 to 2007. He also worked for the FreedomBox Foundation. This organization, led by Columbia law professor Eben Moglen, created an inexpensive open-source server for those who wanted to avoid proprietary internet and cloud services. From there, Maffulli moved to OpenStack, the open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud, and other open-source projects.
He’ll be taking over from Deb Nicholson, who served as the OSI’s interim general manager. This key step in the move of the OSI OSI into a professionally managed organization. “Bringing Stefano Maffulli on board as OSI’s first Executive Director is the culmination of a years-long march toward professionalization so that OSI can be a stronger and more responsive advocate for open source,” says Joshua Simmons, the OSI board’s chairperson. “We can now deprecate the role of President transitioning to Chair of the Board with confidence about OSI’s future.”
An enthusiastic open source user, Maffulli contributed documentation patches, translations and advocated for projects as diverse as GNU, QGIS, OpenStreetMap, and WordPress. He knows he’ll face new, bigger challenges at the OSI. “Open source software is everywhere, but its definition is constantly being challenged,” said Maffulli. “The zombies of shared source, limited-use, and proprietary software are emerging from the graves where we put them to rest in the 90s, threatening the whole ecosystem.” The OSI has to keep up with these and many other changes. For example, there have been several failed efforts to force ethical rules into open-source licenses. To keep up with these whiplash fast advances, Maffulli said, “mobile devices, cloud, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and blockchain offer new opportunities for developers, entrepreneurs, and society as a whole who all deserve a strong OSI not only to maintain a definition of open source that works in modern settings but also forges a path for how to effectively produce modern open-source software.”
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