For their contribution to Maintainer Month, the OSI has collected nearly four dozen stories from maintainers to create a moment of visibility, publishing them all as a curated collection at OpenSource.org
Last summer, the Open Source Initiative and Open Future convened a group of experts to explore this challenge and propose a path forward. A recently released report from the convening, “Data Governance in Open Source AI” argues that collective action is needed to release more data and improve data governance to balance open sharing with responsible release.
The Open Source Initiative, after years of planning, in October 2024 introduced its initial definition of open source AI, which addresses four different kinds of data and requires those building and sponsoring AI technology to share what data they can as well as the model’s parameters and the source code used to train and run the system.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has officially released version 1.0 of its Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) on Oct. 28 at the 2024 All Things Open conference this week. It’s been a long slow journey to this significant milestone in the effort to establish a clear standard for open source artificial intelligence (AI).
The Open Source Initiative’s Release Candidate 1 identifies four categories of data and demands sharing of data, source code and model parameters.
The Open Source Initiative has been working on defining open source AI for the past two years, and they should release their definition in November,” Columbro said. “OSI’s approach will focus on the principles, providing a binary definition of open source AI — either it is or it isn’t.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) released a near-final definition of open source AI that will free up the broad community of AI developers to create a flourishing movement for AI innovation, much like with the creation of the internet itself.
Stefano Maffulli, the OSI’s executive director, wrote, “We are delighted to welcome Elastic back into the open source ecosystem.”
AI uses both code and data, and this combination continues to be a challenge for open source, said experts at the United Nations OSPOs for Good Conference.
The cries to “ban open source” first surfaced last autumn—partly a response to Meta and others’ “opening” large language models (LLMs). Lobbyists bandied the phrase around political rallies and across policy circles. Yet many critics could not explain what open source means in any context and were unfamiliar with the Open Source Definition (OSD). Not knowing or understanding the technical details did not appear to be a barrier to sharing a negative opinion.
After two years of work, OSI has a draft definition, Stefano Maffulli, executive director of OSI, told The New Stack. The team is going through a “validation phase,” he said, making sure the definition includes everything that falls into the open source category, or is likely to.
The OSI is planning a series of workshops to help it refine its working definition of open source AI, with support from Amazon, Cisco, Google and the Sloan Foundation.
