ESR steps down from OSI 503
Hope Thelps writes "According to an article on news.com.com, Eric Raymond is stepping down from his role as president of the OSI. His replacement will be our very own Russ Nelson. "
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ESR steps down from OSI
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2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League
Approval from the OSI? (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
Since when? Last time I checked, "open source" was a generic descriptor, and only use of the OSI CERTIFIED mark required approval from the Open Source Initiative.
Nice misinformation (Score:5, Insightful)
Approval from the OSI is required for all open-source licenses, which are used on thousands of products, from the Linux operating system to the Firefox Web browser.
Erm, what? I don't need anyone to "approve" my software's license
Re:[tt] You could see this one coming (Score:3, Insightful)
Hopefully Russ Nelson, who I believe has a longer history as a professional consultant to these corporations, will be able to close the deal and get more of these corporations to support Open Source in a monetary way, rather than just paying lip service to the idea.
Re:[tt] You could see this one coming (Score:5, Insightful)
Or at least, that's the way the eaters wrote the history books.
The problem is (Score:4, Insightful)
The stepping aside of the "fanatics" doesn't mean anything more or less than the stepping aside of people with opinions, vision, or a desire to succeed. In the future the "open source movement" will be run like a business, like traditional charities and not-for-profits: i.e., inefficiently, carelessly and by bloated fat parasites who care about their own career, not the organization. In the future, groups like OSI will be operated not for the benefit of open source, but for the benefit of the "grown up" OSI group and its personal power. And we will hail it as the "fanatics" losing power.
Does the person taking ESR's place at OSI represent this process? Probably not. But almost certainly his successor will.
Open source isn't a revolution. This isn't Vladmir Lenin trying to convince people to take up arms and shoot people. This is software development. It is a creative endeavor. In a revolution. Revolutions are tricky because you need people who inspire at the beginning and people who are stable after the beginning. But this isn't a revolution. What is creativity without inspiration?
Re:[tt] You could see this one coming (Score:5, Insightful)
The group who took control of Britain's holdings in America in the American Revolution-- the "founding fathers"-- were already established as the people who controlled America prior to 1750, 1750 being when Britain decided to stop taking a passive, absentee-landlord stance to its American colonies and instead assume a position of active control. The 26 years after that were basically a process of Britain's empowered group going going "hmm, you know, we own you, and we have the right to determine your affairs", and America's empowered group going "you don't have the right to determine our affairs, and you know what, come to think of it, you don't own us anymore either". We call this a revolution but "war for independence" would be a far more accurate way of putting it, since the American side of the war was 13 established and self-sufficient states and their goal was autonomy, not change.
Uh, ESR is hardly a fanatic (Score:5, Insightful)
1. ESR is hardly a fanatic. He is much more of a pragmatist, falling somewhere between RMS and Torvalds, but much closer to Torvalds than Stallman.
2. OSI is an organization intended to promote Open Source software. As such it behooves OSI to have someone at the help that WON'T compromise the open source initiative's goals and philosophy, so arguing that his successor (who I know nothing about and wouldn't assume to be a great deal different than ESR) should be willing to change the organization's philosophy, political, or technical stance for some short term gain is very short sighted and ultimately destructive to the entire movement.
3. Having said all that, OSI has always been vulnerable to a "corporate takeover." Whether or not this is the case here (I kind of doubt it is), the position they've sought out as "mediator" between the corporate mindset and the free software movement certainly makes them vulnerable to that kind of thing.
4. I sleep much better knowing that RMS heads up the Free Software Foundation. These folks definite the stance of the movement. It isn't their job to compromise with those who oppose their philosophy, it is there job to articulate their philosophy and argue effectively for it. It is then up to the rest of us to choose our own stance, either 100% one or the other, or some middle-of-the-road mixture of the two. OSI falls somewhere in the middle, but to imply that moving toward the business end of the spectrum to the point where they become indistinguishable means the movement has "grown up" is to miss the whole point of the movement entirely.
Revolutions only eat their children when the revolution betrays its own ideals and becomes something very, very different. Contrast for example the Bolshevik/Communist revolution is Russia, which ran amok and never established communism, merely a dictatorship that called itself communist without practicing any of the economic or social advocated by Karl Marx, and the American revolution, which did remain true to its ideals for the most part and did in establish a democracy in its wake.
One became a monster with an entirely different agenda than the revolution and its revolutionaries while the other did not. One did "eat its children," while the other did not.
A more accurate statement would be to say that
"Each evoluton which betray itself and its ideals had ended uyp eating its children." In which case I can see every reason to expect the Free Software movement (and hopefull the Open Source movement with which it shares some adherents) should be different.
As a corallary, I would say that if history is any lesson, and if the Open Source (or Free Software) movmements do in fact "eat their children" we can pretty much understand that, at that point, they have betrayed themselves and everything they stand for, whith only the rhetoric remaining to gloss over an entirely different, probably very detrimental, agenda.
Luckilly I don't see any evidence of anything like that happening just yet.
Re:OSI and its approval of licenses? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, you could sit down with all of the various and sundry licenses (the OSI lists nearly 60 of them) and feed each of these licenses to a lawyer and see what comes out. However, the OSI does that for you, and the folks that they have looking at licenses know a lot more about software licensing than you do (they probably know more than your lawyer too).
That's why when the OSI complained about Apple's Apple Public Source license Apple changed their license. The OSI's complaints made sense, and lots of hackers that cared about licenses agreed with the OSI. Open Source developers need an organization like the OSI to be able to bargain collectively with companies like IBM, Apple, or Sun, and the OSI has done a pretty good job. Before you criticize the OSI read their Open Source Definition and spell out precisely what you disagree with. Chances are very good that you will have little or nothing to add.
Yes, not all software licenses are created equal. However, making sure that you stick with OSI-approved licenses will get you a long way towards licensing nirvana with a minimum amount of work. Not only is the OSI more likely to catch small gotchas in licenses, but they are also more likely to get those problems fixed. That's a net win in my book.
Re:Coming ... and going (Score:3, Insightful)
-russ
p.s. try archive.org. My point remains.
Re:Uh, ESR is hardly a fanatic (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you read the "anti-idiotarian manifesto"?
Stumping for irony. (Score:3, Insightful)
Free software proponents, by contrast, champion a different philosophy: all computer users deserve the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify computer software. Thus, software freedom is primary, not technical innovation or faster and less buggy development. Hence, free software proponents never have the ironic situation of advocating the use of software they don't agree with. From the perspective of the older free software movement, the goals of the open source movement are nice as far as they go but they don't go far enough.
Re:Stumping for irony. (Score:4, Insightful)
-russ
Victor writes history? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean, according to the abundance of documentation availabe in private and public collections? Or the vast number of eye-witness accounts recorded in private letters and notes of the era?
This whole concept of "victor writes the history books" is flawed when there is an abundance of evidence that is freely available. We can search through and discover the true stories of all of American history, because every step is documented. If you would like to dispute the work that the historians have presented, please write your own papers and cite your sources.
Re:Stumping for irony. (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, no. As the OSI is proving by the way it handled Sun's patent-encumbered license; they clearly are separable.
Give up the one and you lose the other.
Not really. Give up Free and you lose Open; but as the OSI seems willing to point out that you can keep open and give up on Free.
So what is RMS worried about?
Exactly situations like the OSI approved Sun license - which is clearly as much a weapon used against free software as it is a contribution to open source. Either the OSI did a really sloppy job in proofreading licenses before they approve them; or their agenda is questionable.
I don't understand.Pleast try to, for all our sakes.
Re:The problem is (Score:4, Insightful)
With the attack on GPL and Linux, the **AA, the software patent crap, DRM, etc, etc, it will eventually get to the point where all creative thought will be controlled ('All your thoughts are belong to us') unless the people that are creative rise up and stop the stupidity by the corrupted large corporations and corrupted government.
And that *is* happening. The inspiration is there. It's just a slow revolution that you are not part of and therefore you can not see.
Don't expect to watch this revolution on the T.V. news, you won't see it there.
Re:Victor writes history? (Score:2, Insightful)
Recent polls suggest 50% of people who voted for Bush believed we had found WMDs in Iraq... I wonder what history books will say if we elect Bush III, IV and V.
Re:Stumping for irony. (Score:3, Insightful)
From where I stand, this is a point in favor of OS people. I've never been impressed with RMS's weird little theories. But voluntary cooperation and free access to source code does actually seem to get things done. These are ideas lots people can work with, even people who think that RMS's other ideas are pseudophilisophical bullshit.
So to RMS, the OS movement is this monster that has stolen some of his ideas, while rejecting the ideas he considers most important. But to most people, Open Source is Free Software without the BS.
Re:Stumping for irony. (Score:3, Insightful)
Having the source to software is not very helpful if one does not have the right to do anything with it. Open source development can occur in any organisation - the developers have the right to work on the code. However, if they do not pass freedoms on to the users, the users gain little practical benefit. Users have the right to report bugs and the ability to submit patches for the software vendor's consideration.
If freedoms are passed on to the user, then there are immense benefits to the user, almost regardless of the code quality.
There is an immense difference between free software and open source software. There are good reasons for encouraging open source development even for proprietary software. However, free software proponents see far greater benefits if the users get the freedom to run, study, distribute and improve code.
Open source and free software are not the same. If you are going to be an advocate for OSI, you should really understand the difference. Even if you don't agree with RMS's vision, you should understand what it is.
Re:Stumping for irony. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the same difference as those who say "People should be free because then their economy will prosper" and those who say "People should be free because we are all equal and they have a god given right to it".
Without RMS kook-aid there would be no collection of "open source" success stories outside of BSD and apache and the OSI would not exist. Perhaps you should place an order for a jar or two of that.
Everyone knows that "Open Source" is expressly designed to gloss over Stallman's philosophy that drives him on his mission to assure software users have the freedoms he believes they should.
He has proven himself uncorruptable in this regard. Who else has?
Yes, we all know that people who carry the flag of Open Source are all aware of the neccessary politics involved. Those who claimed otherwise started changing their tunes real quick SCO.
In short, BSD is the epitome of open source. All copyleft is in truth based strictly on a belief and desire in software freedom such as that expressed by RMS.
RMS is therefore the father of Free Software, Copyleft which helps perpetuate it, and the leader of those who will not compromise on this stance.
What is OSI? It is a way to show companies how to mix in some copyleft licensing to bsd open source licensing so that they can now create a semi-open commons which will benefit them no less than their competitors, while still giving them a product they can sell at a nice margin.
Sun and others are still tinkering with the exact recipe.
Again the point is made that OSI exist only because of RMS's innovations driven by his moral stance.
In plain speaking, for many who believe in Free Software, this translates to supping with the enemy. Showing us the tidbits you collect from their tables during the meal, while nice and good does not change that.
OSI does do many other things such as lobbying and advocacy. However, the source is always examined in this case, and due to OSI's corporate ties, one can easily determine that there is perceived taint here.
In terms of trust, everybody knows where they would place that first.
Re:OSI Approval (Score:3, Insightful)
No, not a trademark; the proper description, I think, would be a "term of art."
'As defined in Random House Webster's Dictionary of the Law (James E. Clapp), a term of art is "a word or phrase having a special meaning in a particular field, different from or more precise than its customary meaning."'
BTW, Russ, it's fun to read your Angry Economist, and then use google groups to see what you've said in the past:
"I love it when libertarians reveal their innate illiteracy. Pray, tell me, Perry, where is the declaration of the inalienable right to property? Oh, you made it up? Because it was expedient? And it fit
in with your precious propertarianism? I thought so."