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OSI announces board election results
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OSI announces board election results
Posted Apr 21, 2008 3:03 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]
I'd think most people would describe these as appointments rather than elections. The new directors sound like good choices, but it seems problematic that the community has no recourse if it thinks "the community-recognized body for reviewing and approving licenses" isn't doing its job properly.
OSI announces board election results
Posted Apr 21, 2008 8:31 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
The community has the ultimate recourse of ceasing to recognise this function. If tomorrow OSI says that they feel "open source" includes arrangements where source is in escrow and can only be made available by a third party in the event of breach of contract, then Red Hat, Canonical, Debian and so on will get called up by the press and asked what they think, and they'll say "Well, OSI has no formal status, we don't agree with this decision" and by the end of the week OSI is as irrelevant as the "official" X reference implementation was when the Open Group decided it was going proprietary.
OSI announces board election results
Posted Apr 21, 2008 12:40 UTC (Mon) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]
The community has the ultimate recourse of ceasing to recognise this function.
Sooner or later, this kind of self-perpetuating and unaccountable Board of Directors tends to stray from its mission. Why wouldn't it? There's no outside accountability, and certainly no structural reason to do the right thing.
Dartmouth College, for example, once had a similar self-perpetuating Board of Trustees. In 1891, the alumni association reached an agreement with the trustees, and the trustees opened 5 of 12 board seats to election by the alumni. The alumni provided a significant amount of the College's funding, and wished to have a say in how it was run.
Today, the alumni hold 8 of 18 seats, with 3 of the alumni seats belonging to petition candidates. Personally, I don't like the petition candidates very much, but they were elected by vote of the alumni, and at 3 of 18 seats, they represent only a tiny shift in control.
So what is the Board of Trustees doing? They're attempting to add another 8 non-alumni trustees to the board. There's currently a court case over the 1891 agreement, and preliminary rulings have been in favor of the alumni association.
I've seen other, similar issues in local non-profits. Once you get a clique on the board, the appointment process becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Any attempt at "outside" influence is sharply rejected, because, after all, the insiders know best. Witness, for example, the history of ICANN.
If the OSI wishes to retain any kind of long-term credibility, they need to open their board. In particular, they should reserve a certain number of seats for election by two groups: (1) the core teams of major open source projects, and (2) representatives from major open source companies. This is tricky to do right, but without it, I doubt that the OSI will last another 10 years in any useful form.
OSI announces board election results
Posted Apr 21, 2008 14:40 UTC (Mon) by slef (subscriber, #14720) [Link]
> The community has the ultimate recourse of ceasing to recognise this function. Many of us already have. The OSI Corporation is not the original Open Source Initiative, which was an Initiative to secure Open Source as a marketing term for free software. The initiative failed, there is no useful Open Source trademark and the term is widely abused for all sorts of non-free nonsense now. It was very disappointing when Software in the Public Interest, Inc (www.spi-inc.org a democratic community non-profit corporation) transferred opensource.org to the OSI Corporation a year or two ago. I feel we should have kept it in community control until the OSI corporation was also under community control.
OSI announces board election results
Posted Apr 23, 2008 7:39 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]
>> The community has the ultimate recourse of ceasing to recognise this function. > Many of us already have. Some of us can't cease because we never recognized it in the first place. :) A simple binary pass-fail on licenses is useless unless you're doing something like building a distribution (and indeed, the Open Source Definition made perfect sense as the Debian Free Software Guidelines). But the idea that open source == good, and that's all there is to it, is silly. There's some terrible free/libre/open licenses out there. And, of course, there are plenty of licenses (open or not) that have strange and unexpected consequences when mixed. I don't want yeah-or-nay; I want to know the pluses and minuses of various licenses. I want to know what's good and what's bad about each of the licenses. The FSF at least provides some interesting commentary about the various licenses that they classify. They analyze everything from the perspective of how well it works with the GPL, which is not always what I want to know, and I don't always agree with their conclusions, but they present their reasoning, which makes their information useful even when I don't agree. Just to start with, the FSF divides licenses up into at least five categories. The OSI only offers me two. That's not enough information to make any sort of decision with! Before the OSI came along, my complaints were that the FSF was too focused on the GNU perspective, and the Debian project, the only other group really studying the problem in any depth, had discussions that were too hard (and often too contentious) to follow easily. So then the OSI comes along and offers me information I already knew, brings nothing new to the table, and tries to convince the world that everything is black-and-white and there are no shades of grey, which is utter nonsense. That benefits me how? The OSI is like "Free Software for Dummies". I suppose that It's nice that it's out there. For people with no clue, it at least provides a starting place. But it's utterly useless and completely irrelevant to my life and work. The fact that they're a bunch of self-appointed pundits whose opinions I have no particular reason to respect is merely the icing on the cake. :)
OSI announces board election results
Posted Apr 23, 2008 10:10 UTC (Wed) by slef (subscriber, #14720) [Link]
> Before the OSI came along, my complaints were that the FSF was too focused on the GNU perspective, and the Debian project, the only other group really studying the problem in any depth, had discussions that were too hard (and often too contentious) to follow easily. So then the OSI comes along and offers me information I already knew, brings nothing new to the table, and tries to convince the world that everything is black-and-white and there are no shades of grey, which is utter nonsense. That benefits me how? At least for me, the hope was that a cool logo and trademark-controlled name would be a beneficial marketing campaign for free software, along the lines described in http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-software-for-fre... but right from its launch announcement ten months after the initiative http://web.archive.org/web/20010204001000/http://www.open... you can see how the OSI corporation deviated from that hope, improperly privatising common community resources and generally screwing things up - drunk on powerful fuel? So no, OSI's black-and-white licensor-lawyer-driven system doesn't benefit anyone.
OSI announces board election results
Posted Apr 23, 2008 15:19 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]
The pre-OSI people seem to be quite similar to the initial OSI board from that announcement page you linked to. Looking at other board members who have served over the years, there is even more overlap. Other than becoming their own organisation (as opposed to being under the SPI umbrella), why do you consider them to be two groups? There doesn't seem to be much evidence of a conspiracy or a shadowy takeover. Whatever you think about the organisation, I don't think you can accuse them of that.