here's the link [LWN.net]

here's the link

Posted Jan 27, 2010 2:23 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: here's the link by BrucePerens
Parent article: Red Hat launches opensource.com

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.

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