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A Conversation with the President of the Open Source Initiative (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the keepers-of-the-free-and-open-source-flame dept.

Simon Phipps is President of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) at least until March 31, 2013. He is one of 11 Directors, with Legal Counsel Mark Radcliffe and OSI President Emeritus Eric Raymond serving as advisers. The main function of the OSI is to safeguard The Open Source Definition and to make sure that all software licenses it approves adhere to it. Over the years, license approvals have become contentious more than once. Lately, however, the OSI has avoided acceptance of new licenses that substantially duplicate existing ones, so a lot of the license approval furor has died down. Several recent improvements in the OSI include opening the organization to individual memberships, and setting up the FLOSS Competence Center Network, both of which will no doubt help the OSI carry out and expand its primary mission: "Open Source community-building, education, and public advocacy to promote awareness and the importance of non-proprietary software."

5 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. as a proud member of the idiotarian movement by decora · · Score: 1

    "OSI President Emeritus Eric Raymond serving as advisers."

    do not want.

  2. OSI? Nope. by VortexCortex · · Score: 2

    OSI is Overengineered and inflexible. I prefer the TCP/IP model for my Free Software.

  3. Lose the 'free' by unixisc · · Score: 1

    More public activities, as opposed to activism, would be fine. Such as doing joint press releases w/ various organizations, be they companies, consortiums/SIGs, industry associations and whatever. But I don't want them to be anything even close to RMS - I want them to be a respectable, professional organization pushing the Open source agenda. featuring in joint corporate press releases, having booths of their own in CES and so on.

    TFA, one thing I wish they'd do - lose the term 'Free' from all this, since in English, it's a very nebulous word, as even the FSF has finally conceded. In this case, 'Free as in beer' and 'Free as in speech' are the 2 meanings that spring to mind. Now, since OSI is an organization trying to attract business support and endorsement of 'Open Source' concepts, 'Free as in beer' is obviously a non-starter, but when they use Stallman's favored term 'FLOSS' as opposed to 'FOSS' the term 'Libre' already captures the 'Free as in speech' concept, so that either makes the term 'Free' either redundant w/ 'Libre' or it implies that the 'L' stands for 'Free as in speech' while the 'F' stands for 'Free as in beer'. That's not the message that they want to send. Or do they? I understand that they can't call it 'LOSS', but for the reasons I describe below, they should simply call it 'OSS'

    Even 'Free as in speech' has one problem - the 'freedom to redistribute' clause. That is something that automatically caps what software vendors can earn. Take that requirement out and make it optional, w/o implying that a software that doesn't allow it is not open source. Yeah, OSI is more accommodating about the licenses it endorses, but this is about more than licenses. Losing this would make OSI even more business compatible. So just call it 'Open Source Products' to cover everything - hardware, software, concepts and so on - OSP.

    Speaking about FSF and dogmatic, you know it when even Debian, which was a long time supporter of 'Free Software', embraces membership of OSI. Debian is one good example - they offer both liberated and unliberated software, but are careful to label them and 'warn' you about which is what, so that you can make a call. That's not good enough for Stallman, who thinks that unliberated software should have no place on Debian's servers - they should not even let you know that it exists, and should pretend that it doesn't. This is why the FSF deserves to be marginalized, and OSI deserves to be supported, even though the latter could be better.

    1. Re:Lose the 'free' by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Why not use the English word 'Liberated', which conveys the same meaning as 'Free as in speech, but not necessarily as in beer' that 'Libre' is supposed to convey? Only reason I see for not using it is that it sounds too Leftist, a throw-back to the communist guerillas branded as 'Liberation movements' in the Cold War era. Well, on that one, if that would be the perception, it would be in no small reason due to Stallman's activism, but that's no reason not to use it. Use 'Liberated' as the adjective in technology licensing to describe anything that comes from the FSF; in fact, if they could call themselves LSF or Liberated Software Foundation, that would be even better. But yeah, that would certainly be preferable to using foreign words like 'libre' and 'gratis' to describe something that should be easy to describe in English w/o invoking political concepts.

  4. Before anybody does a 'Whoosh'.... by unixisc · · Score: 1

    The OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model for networking was created by the ISO, and NOT by this OSI (Open Source Initiative), which is a whole different thing altogether. TCP/IP is a part of the Transport layer in the OSI model, and the Transport layer in the DoD model. At any rate, the difference between the 2 models is only apparent in layers above the Network layer.