Ian Lance Taylor on OSI
Ian Lance Taylor wrote an interesting post on governance of OSI, the Open Source Initiative.
Several years ago I agitated strongly about the lack of any semblance of democracy or transparency in the OSI. I stopped when I realized that the OSI didn't really matter. Since then the OSI has some to matter somewhat more--e.g., sourceforge.net looks to it to ratify licenses. But it still doesn't matter very much. And it is also still completely undemocratic and only slightly more transparent (the increase in transparency is thanks entirely to Russ's efforts to increase communication from the board). These are strange, indeed nearly incomprehensible, characteristics for an organization which claims to represent the community (compare to the FSF, for example, which makes no claim to represent anybody except itself).
The OSI also completely lacks any formal mechanism for correcting errors. Thus the argument that one should judge the results makes no sense; by the time there are results, it is too late.
Personally I think the OSI should drop any claims about representing the community, and instead describe itself as a group of self-selected experts who periodically issue opinions about open source licensing-- i.e., more or less the same as any NGO. I think that would be more honest and more helpful.
posted Fri 26 Aug 2005 in /software/opensource | link
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