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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."
British spelling. True story (and it's the correct form of licence too)
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
OSI was purely a product of the Internet boom. It was designed to "mainstream" Open Source by encouraging businesses to open source their stuff. At a time when businesses were scrambling to make sense of this whole Internet thing, the OSI came along and tried to convince them that open source was a big part of embracing the Internet. To do this, they basically bent the definition of what "open source" was so they could get businesses who were highly suspicious of it on board. Any business that gave even lip service to open source was basically allowed to carry the label in the name of expanding the movement, even if their licenses amounted to little more than "you can look at some of the source, but only between 2-3pm on alternating Thursdays when the moon is full, and you can't copy any of it." That's an exaggeration of course, but it seems clear now that the over-eagerness to get businesses on board and the lengths that were taken to get them on board seriously watered down both the definition and the spirit of what open source is supposed to be.
While Bruce Perens has managed to spin all of this into a lucrative career, and Eric S. Raymond managed to famously become a temporary Internet paper millionaire before his big mouth made him a pariah to the movement, the OSI's eagerness to shape (some would say distort) open source in order to appease businesses has been a major point of friction between them and the FSF. While many businesses today use open source, and some even contribute to it, it seems for the most part the fruit of OSI's labor is that many businesses learned how to use open source software to reduce their own development and/or licensing costs while giving nothing back to the community that produced it.
So yes, from the perspective of many of the businesses, it was a big sham meant to give them an "open source stamp of approval" while remaining largely closed source and proprietary. The OSI, however, ignored that in the name of "spreading the movement", which happened to work out well for their own personal finances (if only temporarily, in Raymond's case).
The point is, we can't. I'm not saying the BSD license is a "solution" to the "half-open devices 'problem'". I'm saying BSD advocates don't view it as a problem.
Furthermore, OSX is not completely closed: see Darwin.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Actually, no, US fixed it. French borrowed it from Latin (licentia). When French borrows a word from Latin that like licentia ends in -entia, it becomes -ence. When English borrows a word from Latin that like licentia ends in -entia, it becomes -ense (sentia). But in this case, British borrowed the word from French, while Webster (as he did with color and meter) went back to the Latin original, defrancifying the word.