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OSI Launches Certification Program With Logo
Lao-Tzu writes "The Open Source Initiative has launched an OSI certification program. The OSI has trademarked a logo looking like a keyhole for their use as a graphical certification mark. Python.org is the first website to carry the new OSI logo." One might ask what took so long.
One might equally ask why it took you guys a whole month to note the launch of this certification mark...
> A logo. Wow. You all kick ass.
As Phil Knight said (president of Nike), "People dont want shoes. They want the swoosh."
To make fun of a logo is wholesomely naive. The prominance of brand economics and logos in our economy is beyond anybody's measure. Heck, logos, official seals predate the 1500s. They give an organization a recognizable and terse symbol with which to endorse certain projects or people.
Sure, OSI isn't Nike (most notably and thankfully because they arnt looking to levereage the brand horizontally), but there's a reason MS, Dell, etc has a little sticker they put on stuff. Hint: it works.
"Old man yells at systemd"
This may end up being too-little, too-late. The OSI has frequently fallen off the map, rising up now and again to issue some bland press release or statement - perhaps this is the turning of a new leaf? Will the OSI start to update its web page more frequently and take a more active role in the community?
Signs point to no.
I wonder, why hasn't the FSF, with their decent cash hoard, done something like this?
What if Microsoft comes out with a shared source license called "The GPL"(tm) or something? Yeah that's improbable but still I'm sure there is "branding" value in having a recognizable mark (and not just a recognizable hippy with a beard)...
But public domain software might not actually meet the OSI definition. A public domain binary would not meet condition #2 "The program must include source code". That, and public domain is greatly misunderstood AND not really a license. Even the FSF isn't too fond of public domain software, albeit for the same reason they aren't too fond of BSD-style liscences.
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Is the following slogan:
Open Source built the Internet
Because it did. All major server side software on the internet (major meaning leads its market), an Open Source application (as, of course, defined by the Open Source Definition) leads.
Well, that statement actually isn't be true, and the folks at the Free Software Foundation would likely (and correctly) take exception to that claim. There really isn't any reason to create more bad blood between the Free Software people and the Open Source people, and I would be very surprised if ESR would ever make such a claim, given that the entire process preceeded his movement by a number of years.
The internet was built using Free Software, by free software developers, back when it was still called Free Software, and the term "open source" had not yet been coined. NOTE that 'Free Software' isn't the same as GNU.
Free Software built the Internet. Not Open Source. Not GNU. Not the Free Software Foundation.
Open Source, on the other hand, provided an important bridge between corporate suits and the concept of using peer review and the scientific process to obtain better quality software. My only nit to pick with the open source folks is their shyness in discussing Software Freedom, but perhaps that is simply incompatible with their role, which is to extend the concepts of free source code availability to corporate Earth, to which the words Free Software and Freedom remain somewhat alien and mistrusted.
It is rather amazing that so many corporate types, who pride themselves on a deeper understanding of capitalism than the average person (though I suspect that pride is misplaced much of the time) are unable to recognize the importance of fundamental freedom which allows free markets to operate, and instead of understanding the deep pragmatism that underlies freedom in general, and software freedom in particular, they associate it with vague notions of "idealism" that they somehow assume are therefor incompatible with business. Freedom, and software freedom in particular, are incompatible with oligarchies and monopolies, not free markets and competetive capitalism. Quite the reverse, but I digress.
Open Source plays an important role in educating the public at large, and bringing them part way toward understanding what software freedom is about, which is why I personally regret the animosity I've seen between the OSI folks and the FSF. From my perspective OSI is the guy at the door saying "come into my shop and have a look" to someone who would have otherwise walked on by, while the FSF is the guy behind the counter explaining the fundamentals of what it is you are buying, and why.
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More to the point, why do I need this? If this is the last line of defense, if the text in my license isn't descriptive enough, and if I need another group/consortium to put their stamp of approval on my work, then how is my software supposed to qualify as soft. I mean isn't that what software is supposed to be? Soft?
Man, this is getting out of hand. Why don't we all wear color coded uniforms based on whether we're trying to get something out of software development or contribute something back to it.
The last thing I think software developers need, especially those of the open source ilk, are certifications. Standards, sure. We have a hard enough time selling folks on the quality of our stuff. Why hamstring development more with yet another hurdle? I doubt developers will curry this certification's favor.
Your totally right, of course. This is what the OSI was created for - to 'market' free software to PHBs. That's why they coined the term 'Open Source' instead of Free Software and have introduced trademarks, logos and certification. PHBs (being creatures of habit and little brain) are reassured by such things. OSI is little more than a PHB pacifier, it's genius lies in it's simplicity. Without it, all we'd have is Stallmanism and, face it, no PHB is going to be convinced by RMS.
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The internet was built using Free Software, by free software developers, back when it was still called Free Software, and the term "open source" had not yet been coined. NOTE that 'Free Software' isn't the same as GNU.
I don't think which term was coined first matters. AFAIK most of these tools were not labelled as Free Software by their authors in terms of the FSF's definition (the FSF list of freedoms). They were applications created by people who wanted to share their code with the internet, but not under a specific definition of Free Software (the FSFs) or Open Source. However all these applications are both Open Source and Free Software (in the FSF sense) because they comply with the Open Source Definition and the FSF's list of freedoms.