Why We Still Need OSI 108
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."
Re:FTFS: (Score:5, Informative)
British spelling. True story (and it's the correct form of licence too)
Of course we need the OSI (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So tell me... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OSI is getting exactly what they pushed (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.