Bruce Perens needs your help in re-joining the OSI board

Bruce Perens has nominated himself to become a board member of the Open Source Initiative. To get there, the OSI board (which elects its own members) has said he needs to show he has support in the Open Source community. If you want to show Bruce your support, you can do it here: https://techp.org/p/7

My personal comments

  1. If I had to pick one man to speak for me in Open Source matters, it would be Bruce. I respect and have been much inspired by Eric Raymond, but I would not blindly trust him to speak for me in general as he seems too full of surprises and perhaps a bit self centered even. Similarly, I wouldn't want Richard Stallman to speak for me in general, while his work is invaluable, he would be too extreme to actually represent me. (To be fair, RMS is good at finding balance when needed, as the GPLv3 process showed.)
  2. That Bruce, as the co-founder of OSI and sole author of the Open Source Definition has to make this kind of plea to become elected to the OSI board is IMHO really pathetic. I hope he succeeds getting elected and I hope the OSI gets its act together after that.
  3. I read between the lines that Bruce is directing criticism to the fact that OSI approved as legitimate Open Source licenses the ones Microsoft submitted. I personally support that decision. I think the OSI should approve all licenses that are compatible with the Open Source Definition. At the same time, the OSI should also select a small set of 3-5 most popular licenses and promote them as preferred licenses. This is the right way to combat license proliferation. After all, Mozilla, IBM, Nokia.. all had their own licenses made first, before their lawyers became more comfortable with the more commonly used licenses. Why should Microsoft be discriminated just because they are 10 years late to the party? Well, and the fact that they are an evil monopoly... And they are secretly funding SCO and patent trolls to attack Linux... And bribing the OOXML standardisation... Yes, even in the light of all this, OSI should not discriminate a valid Open Source license just based on the submitter. But it should do other things to encourage usage of fewer licenses.
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