here's the link [LWN.net]

here's the link

Posted Jan 27, 2010 1:02 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
In reply to: here's the link by coriordan
Parent article: Red Hat launches opensource.com

I think it's fair to say that OSI's site doesn't state the history accurately. The folks at the meeting at VA Linux Systems (which I didn't attend - I became involved the next day) were interested in promoting Free Software to business, but as far as I can tell the deprecation of RMS and his philosophy was not on their agenda. If you look at the list of attendees, especially folks like Maddog, many of them are still today pretty sympathetic to Free Software.

The next day the whole thing was introduced to me as marketing Free Software to business. The fact that Eric later engaged in some RMS deprecation was unfortunate and of course never something I wanted or approved of. It should be viewed as Eric's activity, not that of the Open Source initiative.

There is some other statement of history that I dispute on that site. For example, the O'Reilly conference which they seem to view as important in acceptance of Open Source actually came a while after Open Source was announced, and IMO really wasn't important.

And you know full well that the OSD is the Debian Free Software Guidelines with a new title, and even RMS approved of it at the time, so why the heck are you dumping on it?

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here's the link

Posted Jan 27, 2010 2:23 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Thanks for the info about the sequence of events.

OSI used Debian's criteria, which is great, but cut off the philosophy by which Debian rejects (or at least scorns) software that fails the criteria. My negativity is about this de-coupling. People are simply told how to categorise software. Luckily, values of the free software movement and values of the hacker community have survived and exist even in projects which exclusively use "open source" terminology, but this survival seems to have nothing to do with OSI.

So, as I was reading OSI's Annotated OSD (quoted below), looking for philosophy, I though it funny that when I found a clause which could be read as promoting social values, it's immediately followed by a note giving only an efficiency rationale for having this criteria - as if to avoid some horrible confusion that equal access might be a good thing in and of itself.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

Rationale: In order to get the maximum benefit from the process, the maximum diversity of persons and groups should be equally eligible to contribute to open sources. Therefore we forbid any open-source license from locking anybody out of the process.