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

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

[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.