The OSI Authority

Posted on June 23, 2007 by Guy Snir
Filed Under Open Source, Opinion |

The latest statement from the Open Source Initiative (OSI) regarding standing up against the misuse of the term “open source”, created a growing community response. Most of the responses are of support (some of the comments are not), but the side effect of this debate is the question raised regarding the authority of the OSI over the “Open Source” term.

The OSI was not able to get a trademark for the term Open Source as it is too generic, so the question is: What is their authority?

Debating this question of authority brought me to think about the development and adoption of software protocols, and the similarities between these cases. The main line of similarity I wish to draw between the use of the Open Source Definition (OSD) and the use of software protocols is interoperability.

As an example, lets look at Web Services (which is a very generic term). A set of standards and protocols where defined for Web Services, that are generally accepted by the market / community. As far as I know, anyone can create a software with their own invented protocol for publishing services over the web and write on their website that they have a “Web Service” (I did not find a registered trade mark for “Web Service[s]”). Some people might try the software and find it useful, but once they will try to integrate it with their “Standard” Web Services environment, that is compliant with the original definition and protocol, it will not work!

Soon enough, the majority of the community will know that this new so called “Web Service” is not standard and cannot be integrated seamlessly into their environment - so they will stop using it.

In our analogy, people might use self claimed “Open Source” licenses that are not OSI approved, but when the community will discover that they might have interoperability issues with standard Open Source licenses, that the new licenses might have restrictions they are not willing to comply with or just that it is not OSI approved, I believe many will stop using them.

If the OSI will make it easy to find the non-compliant companies / software the community pressure might be strong enough to “force” these companies to either change there license, approve it with the OSI or stop using the term Open Source.

I find that the OSI has authority derived from the power of the community. As long as their is a majority in the Open Source community that agree to give them the authority, they have it!

This is not to say that they are the sole owners forever. Just like the OSI broke off of the Free Software movement, some day this might happen again.

Guy Snir

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