Why We Still Need OSI

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "In response to a comment on yesterday's blog, Simon Phipps writes about the old rivalry between the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). '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. ... But the OSI still plays a very important and relevant role in the world of software freedom.' For instance: Licence approvals have become a much more onerous process, with the emphasis on avoiding creation of new licences, updating old or flawed ones, and encouraging the retirement of redundant ones. It would be great to see the stewards of some of the (in retrospect) incorrectly approved licences ask for their retirement."

Comments

So tell me...

[Rob Riggs]

Who the heck was in charge of the OSI when all these stupid licenses were being approved? I know there was a huge fuss about some of the crap being approved back in the day. I always felt it was somewhat of a sham meant to give cover to commercial organizations wanting to create "almost open source" licenses. Anyone really desiring to release open source already had a plethora of valid and tested licenses to choose from.

Re:So tell me...

[harlows_monkeys]

Who the heck was in charge of the OSI when all these stupid licenses were being approved?

If the license meets their "Open Source" definition, then they have to approve it if they want to maintain any credibility.

This is no different than the way the FSF lists many licenses on their list of Free Software licenses that they tell you that you should not use. The licenses meet their definition of "Free Software" so they have to include them or they lose credibility.

we need OSI to keep their paperwork current

[iggymanz]

http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2009/10/06/the-open-source-initiatives-corporate-status-is-suspended-a-caos-theory-qa/

OSI is getting exactly what they pushed

[Darkness404]

OSI is getting exactly what they pushed: open code tied to closed devices. When you fight for open as a key to business success rather than user freedom, we get Android and their closed phones, we get devices running Linux that are essentially black boxes because you can't get them to run anything else, etc.

What OSI has pushed forward has taken hold. However, I think we can all agree now that GPL V3 was a good idea because it would prevent our current situation of half-open devices.

Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed

[Sir_Lewk]

You make the mistake of assuming that BSD advocates are not fully aware of this possibility, and are perfectly ok with it. The BSD TCP/IP stack has found it's way into just about every proprietary system since it was around too, do you think they don't realize this as well? Not everyone is a fan of copyleft and it is ignorant to assume so.

Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed

[samkass]

If you use the BSD license you end up with OSX and (I mean this as seriously as I can say it): fuck Apple. I think Apple is a great reason to never chose the BSD license.

Yeah! Fuck Apple! Fuck WebKit and the Chrome it rode in on! Fuck LLVM and clang! Fuck GrandCentralDispatch and their attempts at bringing us into the modern world of parallelism. Fuck the dozens and dozens of projects that Apple has spent their money contributing to.

Seriously, man, calm down. Apple is actually a perfect case study in why BSD-like licenses are a great thing for innovation and code sharing in the corporate world. Your Chrome browser running on your Android wouldn't be half so nice if not for Apple...

Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed

[DragonWriter]

If you use the BSD license you end up with OSX

And Free/NetBSD, etc. If you use a BSD-style license (or a public domain declaration, like SQLite), sure, you'll have commercial, closed derivatives. If there is sufficient community interest and the code is open, you'll also have a thriving open-source community, and often the people making closed derivatives (or in-house derivatives that aren't distributed under any license) will still commit code -- and money --back to the open projects (because they realize the benefit they get from having the community improving the code, even if they have some bits they want to keep for themselves.)

Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed

[DragonWriter]

However, I think we can all agree now that GPL V3 was a good idea because it would prevent our current situation of half-open devices.

No, we can't. First of all, because I doubt we'll all agree that "half-open" devices are inherently evil, and second because I'm sure some of us would disagree that, even granting that "half-open" devices are evil, that the general approach in the GPL v3 approach to addressing the problem is desirable, and lastly because the GPL v3 specifically allows half-open business- (rather than consumer-) oriented devices, so even if the general approach it takes to addressing half-open devices were a desirable approach to dealing with a real problem, the GPLv3 would not, in fact, prevent half-open devices.

Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed

[Darkness404]

The thing is, as much as I'd really like to dismiss RMS and the rest of the FSF as a bunch of loons who don't understand how software works, I can't because they've been spot on for a lot of things. And really it seems like http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/infrastructures.png we say that their policies are unreasonable, that their predictions are outlandish but then they come true.

Look back at "Can you trust your computer?" written by RMS in I believe 2002

The technical idea underlying treacherous [trusted] computing is that the computer includes a digital encryption and signature device, and the keys are kept secret from you. Proprietary programs will use this device to control which other programs you can run, which documents or data you can access, and what programs you can pass them to. These programs will continually download new authorization rules through the Internet, and impose those rules automatically on your work. If you don't allow your computer to obtain the new rules periodically from the Internet, some capabilities will automatically cease to function.

Does that not sound like it hasn't already happened? In 2002, yeah, it sounded stupid, sounded outlandish. But look at the iPhone, restrictions on even Android devices like the BackFlip, DRM in the form of "unlimited music", etc.

And this isn't an isolated incident, look at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html and see when they were written, a lot of them, if not all of them, came true. Perhaps not in the way that it was written, but the underlying forces did it in a different way.

I'd really, really like to say that the FSF has unworkable policies, and many times they do, but I can't help but looking at their past work and seeing how they were right on track.

Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed

[dfghjk]

"However, I think we can all agree now that GPL V3 was a good idea because it would prevent our current situation of half-open devices."

No, we can't.

Open software is open software. It does not come with any promise that you have hardware that you can retask as you please.

Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed

[jedidiah]

> The most popular desktop Unix variant in the world? Oh the horrors!

Nothing visible or relevant about the platform is actually Unix.

In the case of the more closed Apple devices, you can't even access that part of the device unless you indulge in a hack that may or may not be illegal under the DMCA.

All the Unix-ness of MacOS does is gives Apple a shortcut and free R&D. It's like a big fat hunk of corporate welfare. Except it is being extracted directly from the masses rather than going through a government intermediary first.

Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed

[Kjella]

The most popular desktop Unix variant in the world? Oh the horrors!

Let me put this as politely as I manage: If all you care about is having your code used by as many as possible, I'm sure Microsoft would take on another unpaid intern. If you know that 99.8% of the people use your code as OS X and 0.2% use it as any of the *BSDs (given desktop market shares of 5% and 0.01% respectively), who are you really working for? Libraries and applications are a bit different, a BSD tool can run alongside a commercial one but you normally just run the one OS.

I think there's a huge perception gap between the BSD crowd and Apple. The BSD crowd see it like "Oh yeah, we're the CORE. The engine of the car. We're like the most important part of OS X". Apple is in my impression more like "The BSDs? Yeah we got like the concrete foundation from them, the bricks and the I-beams and whatnot. But we did all the design and layout and architecture and decorating to build the things that makes people go wow. The rest is commodities and it made no sense for us to reinvent the wheel."

That last bit I've heard as an explanation quite often. but to me that's a rather dismal prospect. Products that aren't ever going to make it on their own, that exist only deep down within some other products and that rarely get you the gratitude of anyone. Coders aren't given tasks that are already done, if there's already code to do something they'll get a different task - they don't get slack because of BSD. Customers are so detached from this process they probably don't even know OS X is based on BSD and Apple isn't going to make any PR effort to inform them. Nor would it help them since they can't change OS X anyway. Steve Jobs is probably happy for the lower way costs improve his profit margins though, so he can buy more turtlenecks.

Yes of course it is open source, the code doesn't go away. But if it hardly sees any use in any other product but OS X, what's the point of it all? Why not just be an employee and get paid to write OS X code? Granted, there are many issues with the GPL but for better and worse it's 100% used in open source software. It's not hiding deep ine bowels of the "About" page and some innards noone will ever see.