OSNews

"Remember, the OSI is ultimately the arbiter of what it considers open-source."

If they only want to be arbiters of what *they themselves* consider to be open-source, then their opinion counts for very little.

They purport to be something higher than that.
As evidence, I present this article:
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http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/21/1146259
"OSI To Crack Down On "Open Source" Abusers
... the Open Source Initiative is getting tough on any vendors who claim to be open source despite not actually using a license approved by the OSI. In his blog post, OSI president Michael Tiemann writes:
http://www.opensource.org/node/163
""Enough is enough. Open Source has grown up. Now it is time for us to stand up. I believe that when we do, the vendors who ignore our norms will suddenly recognize that they really do need to make a choice: to label their software correctly and honestly, or to license it with an OSI-approved license that matches their open source label.""
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Sounds like OSI is on a power trip (read the blog for further details), claiming that anything they don't approve as open source isn't just because they say so.

In fact, one of the commentors to Michael Tiemann's diatribe speaks for rationality:
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http://www.opensource.org/node/163#comment-137
"Submitted by sab39 on Thu, 2007-06-21 18:37.:
Michael, thank you for posting this. I agree almost entirely with what you say, I think it's *extremely* important to reject attempts to co-opt the phrase "Open Source" to cover licensing terms that do not meet the OSD.

However, I disagree with your attempt to define "Open Source" as specifically "OSI Approved licenses only". There are licenses that meet the OSD that are still in limbo in the OSI process, there are licenses that have been rejected for reasons that do not prevent them from actually being Open Source (license proliferation, for example) and there are licenses that have not been properly submitted for consideration at all, but still meet the OSD (I'm thinking particularly here of Microsoft's Permissive License; generally regarded as meeting the OSD/DFSG but the OSI has thus far declined to evaluate it).

We *have* an Open Source Definition that has been tuned over many years now. I'm not keen on the OSI's proposal to replace that definition with "it's open source if we say so".
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OSI definitely considers itself, not just the arbiter of what *they* consider to qualify as "open-source", but the defining, unquestioned authority as to what constitutes "open-source", period.

Given that, they put themselves in a bad position if they reject MS-PL, a license that appears to meet the criteria of OSD, for reasons that fall outside of OSD (e.g. politics or what-have-you).


"You, and others, are basically taking the initial position that OSI will in fact reject the license because they're biased against Microsoft. "

Go back and read my posts, and you'll see that I'm taking the exact opposite position that you ascribe to me. The only reason I've continued posting on this beyond my initial two posts is to argue against the notion put forward by some that it would be fine and dandy for OSI to reject MS-PL on the basis of politics and/or without disclosing the details of any purely technical reasons. Neither of the two issues raised (the name and alleged incompatibilities) has anything to do with OSD. I have to assume that the undisclosed compatibility issues are so bad that they warrant rejection of MS-PL even though they have nothing to do with OSD. But we need to know the exact nature of the incompatibilities in order to be able to judge that.

Edited 2007-09-23 09:28