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posted by hubie on Wednesday May 04 2022, @04:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the dirty-politics dept.

Technology journalist Nathan Willis has taken a look at the election at the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The election appears to have brought with it several severe conflicts of interest. Several sponsors are running candidates and several corporations are running multiple candidates for multiple seats. Little information was available about some candidates and their stances on Open Source Software and its community.

Ostensibly, these elections are serious affairs. The OSI is high-profile organization, with a robust list of Big Tech sponsor companies funding it. And "open source" as a term is the OSI's property: the OSI is in charge of the trademark and defends it when it is misused; the OSI also maintains the formal "open source" definition and the list of licenses that you are permitted to call "open source". [...]

Nevertheless, these elections kinda just plod through without a lot of interest or engagement. [...] That's in pretty stark contrast to the public back-and-forth that happens for Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections and the brouhaha over recent leadership "maneuvering" (scare quotes intentional) in the FSF.

The OSI board candidates can each write a candidacy-page text that gets put on the wiki, but it can say whatever they want. In short, to you the voter, there's no genuine back-and-forth provided. No debates, no time allotted, no required position papers, etc. For the past few years, however, Luis Villa has made an effort to pose questions to the candidates. I think that's great. Although not everyone answers, some do. [...]

Follow the story link for a detailed breakdown of the ballot candidates and the issues he is concerned about.

The OSI is a high-profile organization which has more or less curated the canonical list of Open Source Software licenses, which is basically a superset of Free Software licenses. The board currently has members from hostile opponents such as Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Washington.

Previously:
(2020) Open Source Initiative Bans Co-Founder, Eric S. Raymond, from its Mailing Lists
(2019) Has FOSS Traded its Shared Values for Success in the Marketplace?
(2018) The Next 20 Years of Open Source Software Begins Today


Original Submission

Related Stories

The Next 20 Years of Open Source Software Begins Today 20 comments

Over at the Open Source Initiative, Simon Phipps writes about the past, present, and future of Open Source Software as it turns 20 this year. Thought of in a strategy session on how to make Free Software more palatable to certain business interests, the orignal idea was for it to be a stepping stone from proprietary to Free Software by focusing first on the advantages of the developmental model.

Thirty-five years ago when Richard Stallman decided that he could no longer tolerate proprietary software, and started the free software movement, software freedom was misunderstood and dismissed. Twenty years ago a group of free software advocates gathered in California and decided that software freedom needed to be brought to the business world. The result was a marketing program called "open source". That same month, February 1998, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded as a general educational and advocacy organization to raise awareness and adoption for the superiority of an open development process.

Of course, old-timers will remind us that originally software was source and binaries did not count. Up until the late 1970s or early 1980s, when you bought software, it was source.

Source : Happy Anniversary—The Next 20 Years of Open Source Begins Today

Related:
https://perens.com/2017/09/26/on-usage-of-the-phrase-open-source/


Original Submission

Has FOSS Traded its Shared Values for Success in the Marketplace? 29 comments

https://fossforce.com/2019/03/foss-on-the-road-to-nowhere/

The FSF and Linux Foundation are not the only organizations that could assume the moral leadership of FOSS. practices the same ideals that existed in FOSS twenty years ago. Similarly, after years of inactivity, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been struggling recently to again be relevant. However, both have a long way to ago before they can speak for the majority of FOSS, assuming they would care to.

Maybe the loss of a single direction is a sign of the success of FOSS. Maybe shared ideals can only exist at a certain point in a movement's development, and to wish otherwise is only meaningless nostalgia. Yet, despite the success of FOSS, today it has only partly transformed technology and business, and much remains to do. Unless we decide to content ourselves with what has already been done, I think that a sense of meaning — of making a difference — is more useful than seeing FOSS as nothing more than a shorter time to market.


Original Submission

Politics: Open Source Initiative Bans Co-Founder, Eric S. Raymond, from its Mailing Lists 175 comments

Open Source Initiative bans co-founder, Eric S Raymond:

Last week, Eric S Raymond (often known as ESR, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and co-founder of the Open Source Intiative) was banned from the Open Source Intiative[sic] (the "OSI").

Specifically, Raymond was banned from the mailing lists used to organize and communicate with the OSI.

For an organization to ban their founder from communicating with the group (such as via a mailing list) is a noteworthy move.

At a time when we have seen other founders (of multiple Free and Open Source related initiatives) pushed out of the organizations they founded (such as with Richard Stallman being compelled to resign from the Free Software Foundation, or the attempts to remove Linus Torvalds from the Linux Kernel – both of which happened within the last year) it seems worth taking a deeper look at what, specifically, is happening with the Open Source Initiative.

I don't wish to tell any of you what you should think about this significant move. As such I will simply provide as much of the relevant information as I can, show the timeline of events, and reach out to all involved parties for their points of view and comments.

The author provides links to — and quotations from — entries on the mailing list supporting this. There is also a conversation the author had with ESR. The full responses he received to his queries are posted, as well.


Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @05:40AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @05:40AM (#1242135)

    (burp) ahh yeah

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by Frosty Piss on Wednesday May 04 2022, @05:54AM

      by Frosty Piss (4971) on Wednesday May 04 2022, @05:54AM (#1242136)

      I’ve got something frosty for you, Slashdot Boi…

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @07:00AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @07:00AM (#1242142)

    The movement has been crumbling for years now. There isn't enough new blood since the young don't have the time or financial security for a professional-grade hobby, the old guard is aging out or being driven out, corporate sabotage, and infiltration by the Post-Meritocracy Movement. This is just the latest round.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 04 2022, @11:20AM (3 children)

      by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday May 04 2022, @11:20AM (#1242163)

      I'm going to have to disagree with that.

      It's not dying. It is becoming more and more corporate, because more and more projects are basically controlled entirely by companies like Google, Red Hat, Amazon, or Oracle. And a lot of the benefits of open source are still happening in those projects (the transparency, the adaptability, the free-as-in-beer), but it's definitely not the same feel as the early days of GNU where a bunch of academic neckbeards were trying to replace working systems with their own stuff on principle.

      It's a damn good thing that most of the major projects have licensing that prevents them from being turned into proprietary software, though, because that's exactly what would have happened without those licenses. And we know that because that's exactly what Apple did with BSD.

      --
      "Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @09:32PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @09:32PM (#1242313)

        We get the public part as transparent, but not the in house one. Later the decissions are "transparently" pushed into the rest as "fait accompli".

        Oh, BTW, this never reached front page https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=54858 [soylentnews.org] Debian is also changing their ways.

        • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday May 05 2022, @02:16AM (1 child)

          by Thexalon (636) on Thursday May 05 2022, @02:16AM (#1242353)

          The transparency I'm referring to isn't with regards to the decisionmaking process, but with regards to the results of those decisions, i.e. the code. Say whatever you want about how Debian does things, you can always open up the code and look for yourself to see what it does.

          --
          "Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2022, @03:35AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2022, @03:35AM (#1242359)

            Someone told me years ago (and I agree) that a project so complex that you give up when trying to add a minimum change can be open source in form, but not in spirit. Complexity becomes a defense against forking, and very effective, thus making "open source" pretty moot. In other words, propietary software in fact with a nice coat of openwashing, and works with non-BSD-style licenses, even "source must always by avaliable" types like AGPL.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday May 04 2022, @09:20AM (1 child)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Wednesday May 04 2022, @09:20AM (#1242151)

    The Polish-Lithuanian empire was the greatest democracy the world had ever seen. Highest proportion of suffrage ever in the history of the world for a major state (I think).

    The Russians, Prussians and Austrians coerced and bribed the electorate and eventually partitioned the remnants.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @04:56PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2022, @04:56PM (#1242249)

      As Ben Franklin famously said about the newly minted United States: "A republic, if you can keep it." He wasn't kidding about the seriousness of that warning.

  • (Score: 1) by Night Goat on Wednesday May 04 2022, @08:22PM

    by Night Goat (8850) on Wednesday May 04 2022, @08:22PM (#1242292)

    I figured that by this point, all of the amateurs were out of leadership roles in open source. I mean, other than like Pat Volkerding from Slackware and maybe a couple peripheral BSD guys, is there anything left that isn't fully in corporate clutches?

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