The Open Source Monopoly
I just came across The
Open Source Monopoly by Lajos Moczar. Near the beginning the author
wrote,
Let's first consider the meaning of the term "open source". This term
is actually a service mark of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) [...]
Let's see what OSI
has
to say about that:
Unfortunately, the term "open source" itself is subject to misuse,
and because it's descriptive, it can't be protected as a trademark
(which would have been our first choice). [...] OSI is registering a
certification mark, OSI Certified, for this purpose.
Got off to the wrong start, I'll say. Where's the
academic
rigour? I'm finding the paper hard going. Oh, here's a thread on it on
theserverside.com.
Ah, and the author has just posted a followup,
The Economics of Open
Source.
Seems more like a classic "look at me, I'm a commentator, here's a controversial title that will get me on Slashdot" type of position paper than anything worth reading through.
So what if OSI is the only organisation to grant a particular certification (which they themselves created) to a licence or project? The whole point of OSI was to create some kind of consensus around the various "liberal" or Free Software licences of the era and to distill the particulars down to what it is that makes such licences fair to developers and users, and then to say that a particular term ("open source") refers to that position and not to anything else.
Just like no-one had to certify their operating system as UNIX, although I accept that some certification may be necessary to meet certain requirements in bidding for certain kinds of projects or purchases, no-one has to get OSI certified. That said, given the consensus and the large number of existing licences which are certified, one has to wonder what companies like Sun are playing at by inventing yet more licences (other than deliberately making things difficult for themselves and other people, perhaps).
And with respect to the JBoss vs. Geronimo posturing, from what I've heard about the ethics of various sections of the JBoss developer community, I'd suggest that they invent their own special term (just like Microsoft did with "shared source") and get back to what they seem to like doing best: hyping it and themselves.
You're right. I stopped reading.
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