March 2nd, 2005
Nelson exiting OSI presidency with non-proliferation swan song?
The Open Source Initiative — the organization whose seal of approval counts most on software licenses that say they’re open source — has got its fair share of challenges ahead of it. According to a report by News.com’s Stephen Shankland, the OSI’s President Russ Nelson has floated a proposal to keep a lid on the proliferation of licenses that now bedevils the open source community. As of the annointment of Sun’s recently submitted CDDL license, the total number of such licenses has risen to 58, and there’s little to keep that number from going up. One problem is that once the OSI began its practice of approving vendor- and project-specific licenses, it couldn’t stop without being accused of discrimination on subjective grounds.
I’ve already written about why proliferation of open source licenses is problematic for the open source community, and the OSI clearly agrees. But now comes a twist. Amidst a bit of controversy, Nelson, who was only installed into the OSI presidency one month ago, may be stepping down, according to my sources. It appears that filling in as acting president (making this the third president in as many months) will be Red Hat vice-president of open source affairs Michael Tiemann, who is currently an OSI board member.
How the potential, and perhaps temporary, appointment of a large Linux vendor executive will affect open source’s political landscape remains to be seen. Red Hat’s claim to be an open source play is been the subject of harsh criticism from others in the open source community, including JBoss founder Marc Fleury and Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz, both of whom think that Red Hat takes way more from the open source community than it gives.
Meanwhile, in a recent audio interview, Open Source Development Labs CEO Stuart Cohen told me that he’s got verbal agreement from the vendors whose licenses are partially to blame for the proliferation that they’d be willing to make some sacrifices if it means that the total number can be pared back. But when asked if the OSDL should take on the responsibility of open source oversight or merge with the OSI because of the turbulence at the OSI, Cohen said that an independent organization like the OSI for license oversight needs to exist. Because of the way OSDL receives a significant amount of its funding from the vendor community, some believe that the mixing of those corporate interests with licensing oversight is like mixing oil and water.
