451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Bruce Perens draws his line in the sand
Matthew Aslett, March 19, 2008 @ 5:36 am ETBruce Perens has announced his intention to stand for election to the executive board of the Open Source Initiative with a stated policy of reducing vendor representation and license proliferation. He is asking for individual open source developers and supporters to back his campaign and show community support for his candidacy.
I mentioned recently that “As many mainstream IT vendors respond not by adopting open source methodologies but by adapting them to fit proprietary models there appears to be increased tension between a Free Software movement exhibiting a strengthened resolve to stand by its principles, and an Open Source Software movement in which individuals have to decide where they draw the line”.
Since then we have seen Sun’s Simon Phipps offering to help redefine the Open Source Definition and now Perens standing to reduce vendor involvement in the OSI. I’m not calling it a crisis just yet, but from the language used by both indicates that they have decided that enough is enough.
“I do believe that certain recent events between the open and proprietary software worlds mean that it’s time for software freedom fighters to get together and work on these things,” stated Simon.
“With its increasing participation in Open Source, there’s even a chance that Microsoft could be offered an OSI board seat. I have been an outspoken opponent of vendor excesses, fighting SCO, the Novell-Microsoft agreement, etc., for more than a decade. Help me continue that work,” stated Bruce.
Matt Asay, incidentally, calls the potential of Microsoft joining the OSI board a strawman, and he may well be right (Michael Tiemann certainly thinks he is), but the fact that it has been raised at all is an indication that battle lines are being drawn.
Categories: Licensing, Software
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Perens throwing in the “even Microsoft might get a seat on the board” is the kind of scare mongering that we usually see from the Bush administration regarding terrorism.
As I explain on my blog, saying that the OSI would offer Microsoft a seat is like saying we’ll elect the Republican Party to the White House. The board seats are held by individuals, not by corporations, and we take great care to consider only the individual’s potential for conflict of interest or appearance of corporate favoritism *as negative indicators* rather than considering *at all* whatever positive benefits that person’s corporate affiliations may bring. Thus, I agree with Swashbuckler that Bruce is making a statement that is logically, historically, and categorically wrong.
Thanks for the input Michael. I’ve added a link to the post above.
Please sign onto my campaign at http://techp.org/p/7.
While we are now told that a Microsoft candidacy is not realistic this year, I would like to be there to vote against it next year or the year afterward. The board’s self-electing mechanism does not let us know who the candidates are (other than me) or even what the date of the election is. There is no visibility at all. So, obviously it’s reasonable to be concerned about who is getting in there. Current OSI board member Matt Asay also leads the Open Source Business Conference, where Microsoft was offered the keynote speech.
Mike Tiemann claims that they elect officers, not the companies they work for. Unfortunately, this can be naivé. Individual representation is also the stated policy in some standards organizations, where I have sat across from an avowed “individual” who was clearly representing his company.
[...] So what to do now? As I chuckle over the recent scorched earth campaign by Bruce Perens in an attempt to regain former glory, I’ve been thinking about some recent articles and blog posts which mention an “identity crisis” for Open Source. Upon further thought, I think there is an identity crisis at work, but it’s not merely the result of coming of age or losing authenticity, as suggested elsewhere. Rather, it is the result of a narrowing of thought, a failure to comprehend, and a willingness to remain blind to new information. It is the same type of thought that will lay down the law of what “open” means and reward those - and only those - who adhere to the OSD, without considering the possibility that new developments demand thoughtful reexamination of the rules. After all, because of the success of the term “Open Source”, the OSI *must* have been absolutely correct in its formulation and governance, right? [...]
[...] Perens had previously campaigned to be considered alongside Martin Michlmayr and Harshad Gune and while he succeeded in that regard, [...]
[...] have previously observed a growing animosity of some sectors of the open source software user community towards [...]