Your Chance To Change OSI

June 14, 2010

The Open Source Initiative is ready for a revamp, and you could be part of it

Posted by: Simon Phipps ShareThis

When I said recently that we still need the Open Source Initiative (OSI), it started a flood of comment. There's no doubt that we need OSI - but we need a better OSI. The one we have now is just too small to be effective and too mired in past successes; a renaissance is needed. You can help.

Yesterday and Today

OSI was formed in 1998 to solve a pressing problem. The founders embraced the ideals of software freedom, but saw that businesses - being non-persons - lacked any way to embrace a philosophical principle. To advance software freedom, it needed to be pragmatically "projected" onto the surface of the computer industry of 1998. The result was a focus on a certain kind of advocacy, plus an enormously valuable effort to analyse, categorise and selectively endorse copyright licenses. OSI was the pragmatic projection of software freedom onto the computer industry of 1998.
But in 2010, the industry has changed. It's due in no small part to the effects of software freedom on technology and innovation, with the pragmatic liberties it guarantees seeding today's key trends. It's also in part due to the attempted corruption of open standards and the policies that rely on them, which has allowed proprietary software an undeserved ascendancy. So while new businesses are able to be formed with philosophical and ethical principles embedded in their DNA, existing ones still can't "embrace software freedom" since that's a capability only of intelligent individuals.
Today we have a mature understanding of open source issues and licensing that means the advocacy initiatives of 1999 are less necessary and the license approval role has changed. The growth of cloud computing - even with open APIs and open data - means that liberty assurance mechanisms based only on source code are inadequate to identify the presence of software freedom. And the maturity of the open source market means the 'games' that existing corporations play on the market are sophisticated enough to use open source as a corporate weapon instead of as a path to liberty.

Re-projection

We need to repeat the exercise of projecting software freedom onto its surface, reinventing OSI to steward the resulting activities. That may well mean:

addressing today's trends, such as open data and open cloud computing;
increasing consumer awareness of open source and the four freedoms (beyond the code and the geeks);
educating the next generation of computer science graduates (many of whom think open source or free software just mean "Linux");
dealing with the engagement of powerful industry corporations such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle and SAP;
expanding resources for government and NGOs to adopt and institute open source programs;
sustaining license review activities, which remain a key function for OSI (but now with an emphasis on avoiding new licenses unless they are essential).

However OSI is formed with a board which is the de facto entire volunteer base. There is also a chicken-and-egg problem that there is no clear door into OSI so there is no one to form an electorate and there is no "new blood". OSI has been trying to fix this but it requires work. The first attempt the Board made involved inviting 50 people to discuss the problem in an online forum last year. This didn't devise a new governing membership body, but did work through all of the possible ways OSI could be governed and more effective.
Read more...
http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=3009&blogid=41

Update: 12-10-11...

HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source

HP to enable creativity of the community to accelerate the next-generation web-centric platform
PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 9, 2011 HP today announced it will contribute the webOS software to the open source community.

Read More...
http://donsdeals.blogspot.com/2011/12/hp-to-contribute-webos-to-open-source.html

Don

HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source: HP has new plans for WebOS - UPI.com; hp webos open source - Google Search; HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source; DonsDeals: WebOS Apps Stand Out Because There’s Less Competition | Gadget Lab | Wired.com; DonsDeals: Your Chance To Change OSI (Open Source Initiative) - Community - ComputerworldUK

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