The alliance was founded in July 2011 in Stuttgart. The two founding associations, Linux Solutions Group e.V. and the LIVE Linux-Verband e.V., officially merged their groups at their annual general meetings on the 20th and 21 July 2011. The merger aimed to create a unified lobby group for the German open-source movement. In 2014, a further attempted consolidation failed. The OSB Alliance and the Open Source Business Foundation first announced their intention to merge the two associations to form a single large advocacy group on 18 November 2013. After almost a year of negotiations that only achieved an agreement, the merger collapsed on 15 October 2014.
Goals
General goals
The alliance's main aims are to:
Promote Linux and open source-based solutions and their use in businesses and institutions, and to support the providers of open-source software and services
Provide a communication platform to open source-focused IT providers and users, to encourage and promote improvements in open source
Develop continuous contact with politics and public administration bodies
Work to raise public awareness of open source
Central objectives of the alliance:
The use of open standards with manufacturer-independent, fully published, unlimited specifications
The abolition of software patents, or alternatively, irrevocable free use of existing software patents
Inviolability of copyright
Action by public bodies to enable participation, i.e. open data, open innovation and open access
Open-minds economy through public forms of cooperation in politics and business
Net neutrality, i.e. equal treatment of all online data flows
Task groups
EVB-IT: These are supplementary conditions of contracts regarding the procurement of IT services. The templates for call for bids, derived from these supplementary conditions, require reformulation because they discriminate against businesses that offer free and open-source software-based solutions.
The Open Thin Client Alliance works on RDP-based solutions for an operating system-independent thin-client infrastructure
The initiative Deutsche Wolke wants to create solution stacks for cloud computing composed entirely of free and open-source software for "Infrastructure as a service" and also for "Software as a service", that is exclusively provided by German data centers.
Improved inter-operability between the ODF and the OOXML file formats.
Board
The current board of Open Source Business Alliance e.V. consists of 11 members:
The OSB Alliance supports working groups that cover a wide range of issues. As of January 2015 the following working groups were in operation: ; WG Cloud Computing ; WG Education ; WG Events ; WG Marketing ; WG Office Interoperability ; WG Public Affairs
