Honest question; what does OSI actually do? I am involved with a number of OS projects and not once has OSI come up in any context, be it compliance, governance, education and so on.
They own the trademark of "Open Source" and use it to exercise a right to define which licences are truly open source. Now, I guess they are becoming involved in the question of what it means for an AI model to be open source, hence the politicking
Previously, if your project used one of the main OS licences you were good as far as they were concerned. They mainly existed to avoid lawyers coming up with licenses that water down the rights an open source license provides.
This is trivial to look up. They do not in fact own the trademark "open source". Apparently I can't share a direct link to uspto search results, but you can search by owner and see they have 7 trademarks, none of which are for the term "open source".
They own the trademark "Open Souce Initiative," which they say you can use with no advanced written permission if you follow all specific guidelines, including:
> the use of the term “Open Source” is used solely in reference to software distributed under OSI Approved Licenses. [1]
So you can refer to any software as "Open Source," regardless of their definition. But, if you call a piece of software "Open Source" alongside the use of the Open Source Initiative's trademark, then you must also use their definition of "Open Source," unless you otherwise have written permission.
In more concrete terms: they're the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD), which is a rather explicit, but still subject to interpretation, list of criteria to decide if a particular software license is, or is not, "really Open Source". This is very important in the context of "Open Source washing" that is still a thing, and was even more important a decade or two ago, when there was a Cambrian explosion of licenses which claimed to be Open Source.
They review licenses, and act as a sort of PR team for the Free Software movement. The whole point is to make Free Software not seem too scary to businesses.
In that context it is important to differentiate Free from Open Source software.
The OSI is specifically built with a different vision from the FSF.
Free software, shall always be free, with almsource and ideally all derived works.
Open Source wants the code to be spread and for that allows inclusion with commercial software. (i.e. Microsoft was able to take open source TCP/IP stacks from BSD (BSD License) and integrate with Windows 95. That wouldn't have worked with a GPL Free Software implementation. (Even LGPL)
The supporting argument there is: By allowing that Microsoft's implementation was fully compatible to the rest of the world instead of having "bugs" (purposely?) in their own implementation, which would limit interoperability.
The free software argument is that they now took the code and closed it, not giving users a freedom to review (verify) and fix themselves. Which allowed Windows to play in TCP world instead of being an outsider.
If so, I think they made their point alr? I mean, this list is completly riddled to the brim with companies that use open-source! https://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsors
ajb|10 months ago
Previously, if your project used one of the main OS licences you were good as far as they were concerned. They mainly existed to avoid lawyers coming up with licenses that water down the rights an open source license provides.
gonzo|10 months ago
own the trademark of “Open Source”.
They tried, and the USPTO denied their application for same. As such they have any such right to exercise.
They own a trademark for “Open Source Initiative”, and attempt to persuade the public that they alone define the term “Open Source”.
https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines
hiatus|10 months ago
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results
thomascountz|10 months ago
> the use of the term “Open Source” is used solely in reference to software distributed under OSI Approved Licenses. [1]
So you can refer to any software as "Open Source," regardless of their definition. But, if you call a piece of software "Open Source" alongside the use of the Open Source Initiative's trademark, then you must also use their definition of "Open Source," unless you otherwise have written permission.
[1]: https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines
nottorp|10 months ago
So every time I talk about open source I'm a dirty trademark infringer and IP pirate?
fermigier|10 months ago
In more concrete terms: they're the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD), which is a rather explicit, but still subject to interpretation, list of criteria to decide if a particular software license is, or is not, "really Open Source". This is very important in the context of "Open Source washing" that is still a thing, and was even more important a decade or two ago, when there was a Cambrian explosion of licenses which claimed to be Open Source.
tokai|10 months ago
gonzo|10 months ago
[deleted]
dec0dedab0de|10 months ago
johannes1234321|10 months ago
The OSI is specifically built with a different vision from the FSF.
Free software, shall always be free, with almsource and ideally all derived works.
Open Source wants the code to be spread and for that allows inclusion with commercial software. (i.e. Microsoft was able to take open source TCP/IP stacks from BSD (BSD License) and integrate with Windows 95. That wouldn't have worked with a GPL Free Software implementation. (Even LGPL)
The supporting argument there is: By allowing that Microsoft's implementation was fully compatible to the rest of the world instead of having "bugs" (purposely?) in their own implementation, which would limit interoperability.
The free software argument is that they now took the code and closed it, not giving users a freedom to review (verify) and fix themselves. Which allowed Windows to play in TCP world instead of being an outsider.
g0db1t|10 months ago
arp242|10 months ago
If they do anything more than that, then I've not seen it.
nilamo|10 months ago
mouse_|10 months ago