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'Open Source Initiative' President Interviewed by Linux Journal (linuxjournal.com)
The newly-relaunched Linux Journal just interviewed the Open Source Initiative's president, Simon Phipps. An anonymous reader summarizes the highlights:
Phipps collects no salary -- unlike the executive director of the Linux Foundation, who reportedly received over $300,000 in 2010. "We're a very small organization actually", Phipps said. "We have a board of directors of 11 people and we have one paid employee..." But he explains their importance by citing the controversy over Facebook's original licensing for React. "I think prior to that, people felt it was okay for there just to be a license and then for there to be arbitrary additional terms applied. I think that the consensus of the community has moved on from that."
Phipps is proud of the OSI's independence from corporate sponsors. "If you want to join a trade association, that's what the Linux Foundation is there for. You can go pay your membership fees and buy a vote there, but OSI is a 501(c)(3). That's means it's a charity that's serving the public's interest and the public benefit. It would be wrong for us to allow OSI to be captured by corporate interests." The article notes that most issues are resolved publicly, adding that one big concern is "freeware" -- proprietary software offered at no cost but erroenously marketed as open source. "In those cases, OSI definitely will reach out and contact the offending companies, and as Phipps says, 'We do that quite often, and we have a good track record of helping people understand why it's to their business disadvantage to behave in that way.'"
And he's also seeking warmer relations with the Free Software community. "As I've been giving keynotes about the first 20 years and the next ten years of open source, I've wanted to make very clear to people that open source is a progression of the pre-existing idea of free software, that there is no conflict between the idea of free software and the way it can be adopted for commercial or for more structured use under the term open source."
He cites the OSI's collaboration with the Free Software Foundation Europe on amicus briefs in important lawsuits, which he says address "significant issues, including privacy and including software patents...
"I hope in the future that we'll be able to continue cooperating and collaborating."
Phipps is proud of the OSI's independence from corporate sponsors. "If you want to join a trade association, that's what the Linux Foundation is there for. You can go pay your membership fees and buy a vote there, but OSI is a 501(c)(3). That's means it's a charity that's serving the public's interest and the public benefit. It would be wrong for us to allow OSI to be captured by corporate interests." The article notes that most issues are resolved publicly, adding that one big concern is "freeware" -- proprietary software offered at no cost but erroenously marketed as open source. "In those cases, OSI definitely will reach out and contact the offending companies, and as Phipps says, 'We do that quite often, and we have a good track record of helping people understand why it's to their business disadvantage to behave in that way.'"
And he's also seeking warmer relations with the Free Software community. "As I've been giving keynotes about the first 20 years and the next ten years of open source, I've wanted to make very clear to people that open source is a progression of the pre-existing idea of free software, that there is no conflict between the idea of free software and the way it can be adopted for commercial or for more structured use under the term open source."
He cites the OSI's collaboration with the Free Software Foundation Europe on amicus briefs in important lawsuits, which he says address "significant issues, including privacy and including software patents...
"I hope in the future that we'll be able to continue cooperating and collaborating."
psot?
As I've been giving keynotes about the first 20 years and the next ten years of open source, I've wanted to make very clear to people that open source is a progression of the pre-existing idea of free software, that there is no conflict between the idea of free software and the way it can be adopted for commercial or for more structured use under the term open source.
Open Source is about decisions making business sense. Free Software is about ethical decisions. Ethicality focuses on the common good, business sense focuses on one's own good. It's like trying to sell China on the business sense of individual freedom and calling that "a progression of the idea of freedom".
Both can be aligned, and where good laws and markets and consumers reign, that may be more so the case than elsewhere. But putting the cart before the horse stops working once both happen to go into different directions. Open Source arguments are not weather proof.
...is that some of us are old enough to remember that freeware actually means the same thing as open source. When Jay Lucas coined the term in Infoworld he was discussing programs that came with source code and encouraged modification. It wasn't until later that also-rans popped up and decided they wanted to label their product demos and binary-only releases as 'freeware'. Then that jackass lawyer trademarked the term and the parasites moved on to calling their stuff shareware.
Some of us are also old enough to remember Caldera coining the term open source, even providing some of the very arguments in their initial product announcement that Eric Raymond would go on to copy verbatim.
TL;DR OSI was never relevant as an organization and hijacked a movement that was well underway without them.
https://theintercept.com/2018/04/14/donald-trump-ordered-syria-strike-based-on-a-secret-legal-justification-even-congress-cant-see/
Loser.
And free software doesn't even discriminate against business decisions. Contrary to some of the FUD posted on sites like /., free software licenses (even strongly-copylefted free software licenses such as the GNU GPL) don't prohibit money-making. But the free software movement doesn't consider business interests above all else, nor should it. The free software movement is (as the parent, sadly anonymous, poster said) an ethics-based social movement. The principal decision concerns how to treat others properly with digital computers. If one finds a way to do make a business while doing that, great. The free software movement is on record for decades telling people to charge as much money as one can make in that endeavor. Cygnus found a way to do that for many years providing improvements to GCC, then Red Hat bought that company. But there are other ways to make money and, frankly, capitalism doesn't allow most people to spend their time doing what they enjoy or find interesting.
But the open source development methodology and Open Source Initiative were not founded to promote ethical examination; quite the opposite. That group sought to remove ethics from their pitch to businesses and even nay say any framing of the issues around ethics. For many years they told the world a free software focus was "ideological tub-thumping" (as if their views are not an ideology or having an ideology is itself somehow objectionable). They saw free software framing and licenses as competing with the interests of their business proprietor friends and sought to intervene by posing as well-meaning beneficiaries but consistently encourage non-copylefted free software where the chief benefactors are proprietors (such as Apple and Qualcomm with LLVM which is rapidly becoming a nonfree compiler due to the nonfree software one needs to make practical use of the compiler). Today some "open source" proponents strongly argue one should not defend their license choice, and thus render software licensed under the GPL or AGPL into a work licensed under CC0 (which forgoes all rights in the work).
Encouraging people not to distinguish among approved licenses is another problem the OSI fosters. A lack of critical consideration creates the impression that one license is just as good as another, so people pick among licenses on other criteria such as brevity of license or perceived simplicity of the license (shorter licenses are often deceptively simpler; the new BSD and MIT X11 license don't handle software idea patents and thus can present practical problems for derivatives, something monied proprietors count on). The FSF, in contrast, helps people understand the difference between licenses including their practical consequences and when to make compromises.
It's no coincidence or accident that the overwhelmingly corporate computer press mentions the name "open source" so much and rarely frames anything around software freedom. That comes as a direct result of whose interests are being served by the two philosophies. Free software doesn't nay say business but doesn't give up software freedom to promote business desires. Open source proponents frequently drop their entire development methodology in the face of powerful, reliable proprietary software (such as the recent case of Red Hat endorsing the use of Microsoft's patent-covered and proprietary software, running GNU/kWindows or a GNU-based VM atop Windows as Microsoft has promoted, or Linus Torvalds' use and endorsement of Bitkeeper years ago which ended up being a reason why we have Git today). Years ago (circa 2007), the FSF published "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software", a follow-up and improvement on an even older essay "Why 'Free Software' is better than 'Open Source'". The n
Digital Citizen
And he's also seeking warmer relations with the Free Software community. "As I've been giving keynotes about the first 20 years and the next ten years of open source, I've wanted to make very clear to people that open source is a progression of the pre-existing idea of free software, that there is no conflict between the idea of free software and the way it can be adopted for commercial or for more structured use under the term open source."
This, sir, is a deliberate lie. Open Source predates both the OSI and the OSI members' imaginings of coining the phrase, and Free Software is a progression of the idea of Open Source, and not the other way around. If you want warmer relations with the Free Software community, you're going to have to stop telling lies. For one, stop telling the lie that Open Source and Free Software are the same thing, because they are not.
Open Source protects the interests of developers, while Free Software protects the interests of users. They are not the same thing, and anyone who tells you different is selling something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"