My story

In 1993, I spent the summer learning English at the university in Swansea. I came back from Swansea with a suitcase full of floppy disks carrying portions of Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, as well as anything else I could lay my hands on from the Funet FTP archive in Finland.

Later, in 1999, I spent some sleepless nights at sofas in the then AI Lab on 545 Technology Square in Cambridge, MA. I went with Richard Stallman, Tim Ney, and others from the Free Software Foundation to The Bazaar in the Javits Center in New York. It was the first Free and Open Source Software exhibition I attended and while it was certainly not the last, it remains as a fond memory of the early days of our movement.

Hi, my name is Jonas Öberg, and I am a candidate for the Board of the Open Source Initiative.

I am also:

• A fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation
• A founding member of the Free Software Foundation Europe
• A (retired) Debian and Perl hacker

You may know me from places such as:

• Creative Commons, where I was the Regional Coordinator for Europe (and sometimes Central Asia) (2011-2013)
• University of Gothenburg, where I was a lecturer in Software Engineering (2006-2011)
• Free Software Foundation Europe, where I was the Vice President (2001-2008)
• Swedish Society for Free Culture and Software, where I am the CEO (2005-)
• Morus konsult AB, a Swedish company providing advice and competency on free* and open*. I'm the chairman of the board.

I'm running for the board of the Open Source Initiative since I believe that my experience from both the Free and Open Source community, and the Free Culture community, would be relevant for the larger board and the work of the Open Source Initiative. It may seem perplexing that someone with my background, who's been a strong supporter of the Free Software movement since early days would run for board of the Open Source Initiative. My commitment to Free Software is still as strong as ever, but I believe that our community today is too fragmented; sometimes for valid reasons, but often because we do not communicate enough between the various groups.

It would be useful to change this and this is one of the activities that I would like to engage in with the Board: to increase the quality of the relations not only between the Free and Open Source communities, but also between culture, hardware, data, government, and all other fields that are using (and sometimes abusing) the Free* and Open* namespace.

As a Fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation, my focus today is on making licenses such as Creative Commons work better by automating the process of attribution. You can follow my work on this at Commons Machinery, a small software startup that I launched where we work on these concepts.

By the way, the image of me used above, was taken by Kristina Alexanderson and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.