21 Members of the Open Source Initiative board of directors

Brian Behlendorf is an American technologist, executive, computer programmer and leading figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf served as president of the foundation for three years. He has served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003, Benetech since 2009 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2013.

Ken Coar is a software developer known for his participation in the creation of The Apache Software Foundation.

Danese Cooper is an American programmer, computer scientist and advocate of open source software.

Richard Fontana is a lawyer in the United States who is particularly known for his work in the area of open source and free software. Fontana works at Red Hat. Before Red Hat he was counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). In 2012 Fontana began drafting copyleft-next, a modification of the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3). While at SFLC, Fontana was one of the three principal authors, along with Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen, of the GPLv3, the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 3 (LGPLv3), and the GNU Affero General Public License. He is currently a member-elected director of the Open Source Initiative.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is a journalist, computer scientist, Open-source software advocate and software entrepreneur. He was a founder of Topsy, a social search and analytics company that was acquired by Apple Inc in December 2013.

Joichi "Joi" Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Law School. Following the exposure of his personal and professional financial ties to sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, PureTech Health, and The New York Times Company on September 7, 2019.

Jim Jagielski is an American software engineer, who specializes in web, cloud and open source technologies.

Chris Lamb is an English free software developer and advocate. He held the position of Debian Project Leader from April 2017 until April 2019. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative, Software in the Public Interest, the GNOME Advisory Board, the KDE Advisory Board and is a core developer in the Reproducible Builds project which aims to prove that source code has not been tampered with to include backdoors or other malicious code.

Martin Michlmayr is a free and open-source software advocate and Debian developer, currently president of Software in the Public Interest.

Russell "Russ" Nelson is an American computer programmer. He was a founding board member of the Open Source Initiative and briefly served as its president in 2005.

Nnenna Nwakanma is a Nigerian FOSS activist, community organizer, development adviser. She worked for the United Nations for 15 years and she was the Interim Policy Director for the World Wide Web Foundation

Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond. Today, he is a partner at OSS Capital.

Simon Phipps is a computer scientist and web and open source advocate.

Allison Randal is a software developer and author. She was the chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, a member of the board of directors for The Perl Foundation, a director of the Python Software Foundation from 2010 to 2012, and the chairman of the Parrot Foundation. She is also the lead developer of Punie, the port of Perl 1 to Parrot. She is co-author of Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and the Synopses of Perl 6. She was employed by O'Reilly Media. From August 2010 till February 2012, Randal was the Technical Architect of Ubuntu at Canonical.

Eric Steven Raymond, often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, currently in print as The New Hacker's Dictionary.

Guido van Rossum is a Dutch programmer best known as the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the "Benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position in July 2018. He remained a member of the Python Steering Council through 2019, and withdrew from nominations for the 2020 election.

Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative.

Luis Villa is an American attorney and programmer who worked as Deputy General Counsel and then as Senior Director of Community Engagement at the Wikimedia Foundation. Previously he was an attorney at Mozilla, where he worked on the revision of the Mozilla Public License (MPL). He continued that work in his next job at Greenberg Traurig where he was part of the team defending Google against Oracle's claims concerning Android. Prior to graduating from Columbia Law School in 2009, he was an employee at Ximian, which was acquired by Novell in 2003. He spent a year as a "senior geek in residence" at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society working on StopBadware.org. He has been elected four times to the board of the GNOME Foundation. He was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, and blogs regularly. He was a director of the Open Source Initiative from April 2012 to March 2015.

Anthony "Tony" I. Wasserman is an American computer scientist. He is a member of the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative, a Professor of the Practice in Software Management at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, and the Executive Director of the CMU Center for Open Source Investigation.

Sanjiva Weerawarana is a CEO, software developer and open source evangelist. He is known for:His work on the Web Services standards including WSDL, BPEL, and WS-Addressing. Founding WSO2, an Open Source middleware company. Creator of Ballerina. His involvement with the Apache Software Foundation, including work on Apache SOAP, Apache Axis and Apache Axis2. Setting up the Lanka Software Foundation. Involvement with the Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System. Advisory Board Member 24/7 Techies

Stefano Zacchiroli is an Italian and French academic and computer scientist who lives and works in Paris, and a former Debian Project Leader, a position in which he served from April 2010 to April 2013. Succeeding Steve McIntyre, he was himself preceded by Lucas Nussbaum in an election where he himself was no longer a candidate. Zacchiroli became a Debian Developer in 2001. After attending LinuxTag in 2004, he became more involved in the Debian community and the project itself.