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A Look Back At 10 Years of OSI
blackbearnh notes that this week marks the 10th anniversary of the Open Source Initiative. He points us to O'Reilly's ONLamp site, where Federico Biancuzzi (who frequently interviews notables in the Open Source community for O'Reilly) has a collection of interviews with some of the founders of the OSI, including Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond. "Eric Raymond: There is a pattern that one sees over and over again in failed political and religious reform movements. A charismatic founder launches the movement, attracts followers, and enjoys significant successes; then he dies or leaves or attempts to name a successor, and the movement disintegrates rapidly. One of the classic, much-studied cases is that of John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community, 1848-1881. It was especially clear in that case that its succession crisis and eventual collapse was due to over-reliance on Noyes's personal leadership. At the time I co-founded OSI in 1998 I judged that FSF would very likely undergo a similar crackup if it lost RMS, and was determined to avoid that if possible for OSI."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model/
Isn't OSI, the network layer model everyone had too learn in their networking class?
No, they're a electric utility EMS/SCADA Vendor... http://www.osii.com/
If you're REALLY in to marketdroid speak, please note all of their Open-ness products and applications. They're just budding with open goodness.
It's not off topic, it's referenced in the summary.
I read that article a couple days ago. I like how ESR kinda makes himself out to be some sort of puppetmaster, pulling strings and performing delicate feats of social engineering to singlehandedly bring about the current state of affairs.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Once Steve Austin and Oscar Goldman left the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), it was all downhill from there. Shit, even the Bionic Dog would have been a better leader than the current hacks running this death ship.
Surely if there was demand for the Hurd, it would be available now. With a port of Duke Neukem Forever.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
The OSI is like those shysters who sell people deeds to plots of land on the Moon - their only worth is proportional to how dumb and gullible you are.
Source code licenses are nothing more than tools. Each license should fit the particulars of that developer or company's needs or plans for their work. Trying to hijack that process to further your own nutty ideological goals is pathetic.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
Isn't this story sort of a "life threating" menace, like we are used to have in this mass media world nowadays?
Ah!, nothing new!
we get that in our soup every time if we reveal against the evil empire.
Watch out the chopper!
That and the fact Eric Raymond is one of the best trolls ever.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
my interest got more piqued on this Oneida Community,....
He makes it sound like some sort of cult...
All hail the mighty RMS with his almighty GNU power! Hail GNU! GREP GREP GREP!
I, too, thought "10 years of OSI? What? The OSI model has been around for much longer than that!"
Lo the surprise.
I'm glad that ESR sees at least one of his goals as being to reduce the amount of political crap flying around in the community
After he'd already equated Free Software with moralizing and conducting ideological warfare, you could be forgiven for thinking he was more interested in spreading bullshit that containing it.
yp.
He thinks the OSI has been successful? The lack of comments to this story alone shows just how irrelevant OSI is today. Although let's be honest; all Eric Raymond ever cared about was money, the OSI was just a means of accomplishing that goal.
I love open source very much, but Open Source Initiative... Get a different acronym or don't abreviate, I don't know many techs that wont get confused or not think about the OSI model when they hear OSI.
Perhaps since 'free' is number 1 of your definition of open source, perhaps the 'FOSI'
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
and guns
Yep you have described it exactly - Open Systems Interconnection, facetiously used as a way of padding out courses on Networking.
Although curiously in my case, many years ago I did actually meet the elusive and shy beast when I worked on an comprehensive email suite that used X.400 transport and X.500 Directory Services. We were up against competition like CC:Mail and I thought we had a good product. Sadly it died a whimpering death when the top marketroids decided not to push it out to the customers.
Never really thought that the acronym would be good enough to hijack for another unrelated mantra though..
So, what do you think would happen to FSF if RMS died? FSF has a full time director, a (small) board of directors, Eben Moglen as general counsel, some good leaders on the periphery like Brad Kuhn and Daniel Ravicher. We'd be sad, but it wouldn't end FSF.
Bruce Perens.
I don't know if you are that humor-impaired, but I think you're wrong to expect that other folks would be.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Ah... yes. The ol' Noyes/Oneida example from the shopworn canon of 19th-century personality cult case-studies. Is it even necessary to reference this classic, much-studied case by name? Is its relevance not simply assumed by all whenever the discussion turns to leadership and succession? Excuse me a moment [puff] [puff] while I take a drag [puff] [puff] off my calabash pipe and then savor the heady aroma of my own flatulence.
Look at Scientology. Hubbard is dead, but the organization keeps rolling on. It might be around in a century, positioned somewhat like Christian Science. Even the Rosicrucians keep plugging along.
It helps if the cult owns real estate. Christian Science, the Rosicrucians, and Scientology all invested heavily in prime real estate during the founder's lifetime. (When in San Jose, visit Rosicrucian Park, a city block of pseudo-Egyptian buildings surrounded by a residential neighborhood.)
The FSF needs a building.
Geeks might think it's funny, but if someone who didn't know about the FSF and RMS walked in, they'd just think, "Who is this tosser?"
I was thinking about this aspect of human nature at my favorite coffee shop yesterday. The curious aspect of this is our ingrained tendency to admire (or mentally confer social status toward) the kind of person who takes one look at something like this, and makes the snap "loser" judgment. There is in practice no social approbation for the fact that this snap social judgment might be wrong, or that making this snap social judgment is a talentless act (the average nine year old does it six times before recess).
The tried and true human strategy is this: if you haven't got a clue, enforce conformity. That never gets you into any significant trouble.
This is a lesson we learn somewhere in our preschool / elementary school years, and then in puberty the lesson is reinforced with a pile driver of social derision.
There was a new girl who showed up in my grade six year. She had been in an accident with some boiling water. Her entire lower face below the nose was hideously disfigured. This was back in the era of the Jackson Five. Back then, you couldn't alter your hideous disfigurement with a new one. By that age I had spent some time in a children's hospital, down the hall from the burn unit. I wasn't inclined to laugh. Nor was the rest of my class for the first two months: they were too freaked out by the red and pink planetscape of moonbuggy skin folds. The girl was in heaven. Within a few weeks, she had convinced herself this school was different.
Not for long. Soon the pre-adolescent piranhas gathered their nerve. The burned girl made the rest of us uncomfortable, she deserved to suffer. Not only was she taunted, but anyone who spoke a nice word to her risked incarceration in their hallway locker.
These are the same people who grew up to become the adults who make these snap judgments about RMS's peculiarities.
So there I am in back in grade six, horrified by my membership in the human race. Not a good omen for my own future popularity, either. I was developing the illness known as "writer".
I don't have much respect for the kind of social security one obtains by having an unfailing instinct for whom to ridicule next. That's my choice, I know the world will never conform. What shocks me is the implicit justification of this behaviour when people put forward assertions that RMS's kooky behaviour is a liability. If I were RMS, I wouldn't have much use for these people of low investment and lightning derision, either.
What would actually happen if we rounded all these people up and blasted them into space on Arc B? How would human civilization fail if deprived of lightening derision? What essential element of human social cohesion would immediately fail us?
I have a suspicion it's a self-populating niche. Remove the worst offenders, those who remain will quickly spill into the vacant niche. Maybe we're *all* wired for asshole ascendency, and at any given time, those of us deprived of the social advantage of asshole in residence make chicken salad out of chicken shit proclaiming our virtuous forbearance. It's not as if you can read the lkml and not detect the agents of conformity bridling to assume power. The more extreme a group of non-conformists styles themselves, the more debate rages over their code of conduct.
I think because the harsh lessons on conformity are first learned at the elementary school age, the lessons enter the mind as inviolate rules of the universe. We acquire these lessons before we acquire the capacity to reflect upon them.
Here's a piece that ran at aldaily recently: What the New Atheists Don't See. I have no idea if this article is any good, I just looked long enough to see that it mentions all the neo-atheist books that have been in the news lately. Children acquire rel
Am I the only one who said "Wait a minute, that band hasn't been around 10 years?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_(band)
I live in a place where those who live forever come to die.
I'd imagine FSF without RMS would be like FSF Europe. I know nothing about FSF Europe apart from the fact that it exists, despite being a FSF associate member and European.
To me, RMS is the FSF.
My audience is very adamant that I not feed the trolls, and thus I will leave this piece to steam on the grass by itself.
Bruce Perens.
Same troll as before, different ID. Note how the times co-incide on each of them.
Bruce Perens.
Get a different acronym or don't abreviate
It was the Slashdot title that abbreviated, not them. A quick glance at their website suggests that they name themselves as "Open Source Initiative", and only then use the abbreviation when the context is clear. There must be countless organisations that have abbreviations in common with other things.
Any confusion here is due to the Slashdot article title, but is it asking too much to expect people to RTFS? Would you complain at Slashdot articles on PCs, asking why they're talking about political correctness?
I don't think it is entirely irrelevant, but it is moving in that direction, unfortunately.
The big issue is that some people involved in OSI on the board or otherwise have strange notions* about the scope of authority that the organization has. These strange notions are at odds with official OSI documents, and see to be the cause of a lot of unpleasantness on the lists.
*Michael Tiemann, unfortunately counts among these, as does Rick Moen and Russ Nelson. They suggest that the OSI has the moral and legal authority to tell everyone else what the descriptive term "open source" means and tell people to stop using it. This is at odds with the OSI certification mark documentation which specifically states that the term "open source" is not something they can legally protect. THis is particularly baffling in Tiemann's case since giving OSI such trademark rights would seem to undercut a number of Red Hat trademarks....
The real problem however is that the people who are bent on this sort of thing cause a great deal of unpleasantness on the lists (more than even the few anti-FOSS people like Daniel "GPL violates the Sherman Act" Wallace). THis is a large part of the reason why I no longer participate in OSI mailing lists or with the organization in any way (the OSI lists are the most unpleasant, unhelpful lists that I have ever participated in). Instead, I hope to form yet another parallel organization devoted to the advancement of Free and Open Source software, documentation, and content. It would probably be a small organization whose real job is outreach. Alternatively, perhaps Software in the Public Interest could take up some of that role....
So I guess the question is, do people think that an "Institute for the Advancement of Open Source" would be a helpful organization?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I ranted about this last week, and while some thought it was interesting some thought I was trolling.
The "Open Source Movement" or "Open Source Initiative" as, I guess they like to call themselves are just harming the free software movement.
First, I have to vent this: OSI is the Open Systems Interconnection, or basis for the OSI Model. Do the "Open Source" guys have to add confusion to this as well?
I'm going to say this again, but I will preface it with I believe that their intentions are probably sincere, but I think that the "Open Source Movement," can we call them OSM? Three letter acronym collision is getting bad, and, well, OSI is an important one, is flawed and attempts to conflate and confuse, either intentionally or unintentionally, "Open Source" with "Free Software." Bruce Perens does this all the time, claiming how close they are.
Free Software is a movement in which you have the freedom to know what is happening on your property, you have the ability to change it, share your changes, and know that no one else can build on your shared work without also sharing.
"Open Source" make no guarantees, attempts no increase of freedom, does nothing for you the user (or developer). It is merely an attempt to make "source code" openly published which is such a minor point of "free software" that it barely has any correlation.
The only benefit of the "Open Source Movement" is the debatable "cathedral vs bazaar" principle, as regurgitated by ESR. As anyone who has worked writing software as well as participating in "open source" projects will tell you, there's a lot less order in the cathedral than ESR imagines, and there's a lot more order in the bazaar than ESR implies. Software development is software development. Linux kernel development as well as most big open source projects aren't all that different than any other software product. Software developers, back me up on this!
"Open Source" conveys no advantage without the freedoms defined in the "Free Software" movement. Even Bruce Perens admits that freedom isn't the prime motivating force. Their sales pitch is that they can't argue the freedom aspect and make a convert. Well, perhaps that is true, but to what end?
"Open Source" without the freedom guarantees is dangerous. On a minor scale, your work that you contribute may be used in a way that is counter to your motivation: one word: kerberos. On a MAJOR risk scale, merely looking at source code to which you do not have freedom can cause you to become "contaminated" and unable to legitimately contribute to free software or worse yet, work professionally. See history of the P.C. BIOS which was "Open Source" but not free. Years ago I was turned down for a job at Phoenix because I had read the IBM BIOS source code.
People who disregard the "freedoms" of the free software for "practical reasons" are making a mistake.
Yes, I agree that the free software movement has to be a little more cooperative with "non-free" software, but as it stands now, there is no philosophical or legal reason why commercial applications can not run on Linux. We just need to codify the methodology in the license that encourages vendors. That is a far cry from abandoning the principles of "free software" as the "Open Source" movement is too do, it is merely the acknowledgment that vendors need the freedom to create their products as they see fit and as long as their freedom does not diminish ours.
and guns
True that - and the thought of that guy with a gun is the only reason I'd ever need to support gun control.I used to care what people said in slashdot comments. Now, what isn't trolling is just plain stupid.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist