OSI co-founder and president Eric Raymond is out. So is OSI general counsel Larry Rosen.

Russ Nelson, who runs a high-level e-mail system design services shop called Crynwr Software, among other things, will replace Raymond. Mark Radcliffe, a partner in DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary US LLP will replace Rosen. Laura Majerus, a partner in Fenwick &West LLP, has been named to the newly created role of director of legal affairs. The lawyers' work will be pro bono.

Red Hat's former CTO Michael Tiemann, now VP, open source affairs, has been named VP. Both Nelson and Tiemann have been on OSI's board.

The Open Source Initiative, keeper of the Open Source Definition and arbiter of all open source licenses, says it's reorganizing to move beyond its current charter. For a start it will expand its board from five to nine people, drawing three new directors from overseas to resonate with developers outside the US.

Sounding a bit like it's going into competition with the new Software Freedom Law Center just set up by Free Software Foundation general counsel Eben Moglen, OSI says it wants to broaden its charter out from licensing and establish principles of open source development and best practices; create a registry of software projects that adhere to those principles; and write a definition of open standards that's consistent with open source. That definition would cover licenses, principles and practices.

According to Nelson, his credentials consist of "being from New York" and having "a bigger mouth" than Raymond, who's from Pennsylvania.

OSI's press release has him saying that "Stresses on the open source community, including big corporate involvement and the expectations of a growing user community are challenges OSI can help with. We'll be offering initiatives aimed at meeting the needs of what has become a serious and professional software ecosystem."

Computer Associates has recently starting reaching out to other big companies to write a mutually acceptable license and rein in the proliferation of open source licenses because of the expense involved in maintaining them all and dealing their inconsistencies.

The move is believed to threaten OSI as well as the GPL since the Open Source Development Labs would supposedly administer the new license.

OSI is believed to recognize some 85 open source licenses and has just certified Apache 2.0, the CUA Office Public License 1.0, the EU DataGrid Software License, the Fair License and the Lucent Public License 1.02.

OSI, which appears to have little interest in taming the license glut, says that interest "is only growing as more and more users, companies, governments and developers seek to adopt, practice and profit from open source."

Nelson, however, claimed that if OSI never certified another license it would simply mean more time to dedicate to OSI's primary mission, which is education.

In a canned statement, Raymond, who is now the organization's president emeritus, said, "One of the natural growth passages of a successful institution is outgrowing the need for its founders to be running things. One of the most important parts of any founder or leader's responsibility is to know when to step aside and let that growth happen."

Which doesn't exactly explain why he's out but he's still supposed to do ambassadorial work for OSI.

Nelson said Rosen was a one-man proprietorship and felt it was "time to move on."

Nelson wasn't clear about whether OSI, a non-profit, would need a bigger budget to cover the expanded charter. The board, however, does want to meet face-to-face four times a year rather than two.

Raymond, who wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," the seminal open source-as-commercial vehicle manifesto, started OSI with Bruce Perens, who left the board in 1999 because of the increasing commercialization of open source. Perens is now connected with Open Source Risk Management, the wannabe insurance company that said Linux might infringe 283 patents if those patents were upheld in court.

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