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Your Chance To Change OSI
,----[ Quote ]
| When I said recently that we still need the
| Open Source Initiative (OSI), it started a
| flood of comment. There's no doubt that we
| need OSI - but we need a better OSI. The one
| we have now is just too small to be effective
| and too mired in past successes; a renaissance
| is needed. You can help.
|
| Yesterday and Today
|
| OSI was formed in 1998 to solve a pressing
| problem. The founders embraced the ideals of
| software freedom, but saw that businesses -
| being non-persons - lacked any way to embrace
| a philosophical principle. To advance software
| freedom, it needed to be pragmatically
| "projected" onto the surface of the computer
| industry of 1998, creating rules that could be
| followed without demanding ideological
| "purity". The result was a focus on a certain
| kind of advocacy, plus an enormously valuable
| effort to analyse, categorise and selectively
| endorse copyright licenses. OSI was the
| pragmatic projection of software freedom onto
| the computer industry of 1998.
`----
http://opensource.org/governance/announce
Open Source? Free Software? What we need is Open Projects
,----[ Quote ]
| Most of these questions are well understood
| within the free software community itself. But
| we generally communicate it poorly by focusing
| the discussion on license technicalities. I
| guess this is because we're so used to working
| in this open manner that we take the it as a
| given. But users, especially in the public
| administration only see the licensing side of
| things because that is the only aspect we talk
| about and have definitions for.
|
| A good exception for this is the Apache
| Software Foundation that has a well-defined
| set of rules that projects must follow before
| they can be adopted under the ASF umbrella.
| Maybe FSF and OSI should also publish some
| understandable guidelines and definitions for
| project openness?
`----
http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/open_source-free_software-what_we_need_is_open_projects/
Opinion: Binary firmware and your freedom
Why We Still Need OSI
,----[ Quote ]
| For reasons best left to the reader to
| uncover, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has
| often been at loggerheads with the Free
| Software Foundation (FSF) and particularly
| with its more excitable supporters.
|
| In the words of one trollish commentator:
|
| The (Free Software) world doesn't need a
| worthless ORG like the OSI.
|
| I beg to differ. I have been (and in plenty
| of ways still am) a critic of OSI, as well as
| a firm supporter and advocate of the FSF. I
| believe OSI should be a member organisation
| with a representative leadership.
|
| I believe it should strive for the inclusion
| to its community critics, ending the
| perceived divide. Most of all, I believe that
| its stewardship role for pragmatic software
| freedom should be broader than just licence
| approvals.
`----
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2977
Recent:
To Microsoft, Open Source means "Windows Encumbered"
,----[ Quote ]
| One of the most interesting things to happen
| in the past couple of years, is Microsoft's
| embrace of Open Source. This means different
| things to various people I've spoken with at
| Microsoft. Some seem genuinely sincere. Some
| seem less so. What hasn't changed is
| Microsoft's behavior to the Open Source
| community at large.
|
| * They have not retracted their patent
| FUD against Linux.
| * They (a founding member of the BSA) did
| not speak out against the BSA/IIPA's
| attempt to have the US government equate
| Open Source with piracy and as anti-
| capitalist.
| * They continue to attack, with legal
| action or threats, any open source that
| competes with any of their core products.
| * They continue to hijack standards
| boards with "standards" that are
| encumbered by patent or platform
| constraints.
|
| Microsoft's version of Open Source Software
| (MSOSS) means software licensed under an Open
| Source License which is encumbered with a
| dependency on SharePoint, Microsoft Office,
| Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Windows
| (Azure or classic). This underscores
| something critical that we have all learned
| over the past few years while on our journey
| towards freer technology. That is that Open
| Source licenses are NOT enough to ensure
| (corporate or consumer) end-user empowerment.
| We also need Open Standards and Open Data.
`----
http://opensource.org/Microsoft-Open-Source
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