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Why We Still Need OSI 108

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the both-sides-of-the-debate dept.
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."
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Why We Still Need OSI More

Why We Still Need OSI

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  • Re:FTFS: (Score:5, Informative)

    by DavidR1991 (1047748) on Tuesday May 25 2010, @10:28AM (#32335958) Homepage

    British spelling. True story (and it's the correct form of licence too)

  • Of course we need the OSI (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bemopolis (698691) on Tuesday May 25 2010, @10:31AM (#32335992)
    Sure, it turns out that S.P.H.I.N.X. is not quite the threat they once were thought to be, but the Guild of Calamitous Intent still lives!

  • Re:So tell me... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2010, @10:50AM (#32336242)
    Eric Raymond. Enough said.

  • Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed (Score:4, Informative)

    by hedwards (940851) on Tuesday May 25 2010, @11:25AM (#32336674)
    I fail to see a problem. You make it sound like Apple doesn't give back and that they just stole the code without putting in any time, effort or money on integrating it and creating a polished product. Point of fact, Apple uses the BSD license on their code, not sure if they do for all the open source stuff, but they definitely use it.

    Additionally it means that you can use binaries if you choose to, whereas with the GPL that's been getting dicier and dicier over the years.

  • Re:So tell me... (Score:5, Informative)

    by eln (21727) on Tuesday May 25 2010, @11:29AM (#32336762) Homepage
    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).

  • Re:Our current situation... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Darkness404 (1287218) on Tuesday May 25 2010, @12:02PM (#32337226)
    There are a lot of fully open devices. Or at least a ton more open than other electronics because you can run whatever apps you feel like on there, change the OS, and do both without jailbreaking or otherwise having to resort to other methods.

    There is the GP2x which is similar to a PSP, now the Pandora, the Nexus One, Google Dev phone, etc.

  • Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed (Score:4, Informative)

    by StayFrosty (1521445) on Tuesday May 25 2010, @02:14PM (#32339088)

    Your Chrome browser running on your Android wouldn't be half so nice if not for Apple...

    Since Webkit is a fork of KHTML, that is subject to debate. Rendering with KHTML in Konqueror always worked fine for me long before Apple had anything to do with it. The Gecko rendering engine could have easily been chosen as well if KHTML was not mature enough.

  • Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed (Score:3, Informative)

    by DragonWriter (970822) on Tuesday May 25 2010, @02:59PM (#32339840)

    Does that not sound like it hasn't already happened? In 2002, yeah, it sounded stupid

    Uh, no, it didn't. It had already happened then; the description in the essay is exactly what trusted computing was being sold as, by its promoters, to the kinds of companies that would use it to enforce their restrictions, looked at from the consumer's point of view -- it wasn't an extrapolation, just the same description from the consumer perspective.

I'm rated PG-34!!