At the OSI blog Andrew C Oliver discusses the potential for the OSI to “develop standards beyond the current license-centric set of standards known as the ‘Open Source Definition‘” with which to judge the business models of open source vendors.

He was responding to this post from Michael DeHaan that defines a list of the principles he feels vendors should follow if they are to benefit completely from open source development and licensing.

The blogs resurrect a discussion that I previously mentioned here about whether the industry needs an open source definition for business and development models.

I wrote at the time that the publication of social contracts by open source software vendors might go some way to setting and managing the expectations of community users and potential contributors, however I am unconvinced that some sort of open source business model definition would have real value.

Andrew writes that “A lot of ‘new breed’ open source companies and ‘old school’ tech companies that are getting involved in open source structure a lot around maintaining control” and that “in that process you diminish some of the benefits of open source. You loose the synergies of cooperation.”

While I accept the point that a lot of open source vendors are failing to experience the full benefits of the open source development and distribution model by limiting external contribution or access to some elements of the code, or both, I would also maintain that is, literally, their business.

All of these companies have no doubt weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of being more or less open and come to their own conclusions. Michael’s list is a valuable resource for this decision-making process, but to turn it into a check-list that defines the ‘openness’ of a vendor has questionable value in my view.

Apart from anything else, you would be left with very small list of vendors that meet all of the criteria. The cat is already out of the bag when it comes to open source related business models and there is no way it is going back in. No organisation, and especially not one that is self-appointed, is going to be able to dictate to vendors what revenue generation strategies they should or shouldn’t be following.

I am also unsure of what the purpose of such a definition would be. I wrote in May that the Equitable Open Source idea might “create a level playing field upon which vendors can be judged”. However I viewed that as a developer-level initiative that would aid communication between a vendor and its community of users/contributors.

As I later clarified however, I also think that for enterprises “such a thing could actually cause more harm than good by confusing potential adopters”. Stephen O’Grady is right in saying that most enterprise adopters would not care about an openness index.

Personally I cannot see what would be achieved by an OSI business model definition.

UPDATE - Russ Nelson of the OSI has also posted on the same topic, arguing that “open source is not about freedom, nor is it about licenses. It’s about community”. That might well be true but I think the OSI risks alienating a lot of vendors if it suddenly decides that their open source efforts are not open enough. - UPDATE