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For some time, the term “Open Standard” has been gaining in market popularity. Unlike Open Source, which has had a concrete definition for almost ten years, the term Open Standard was merely a feel-good term with no actual technical meaning. Nevertheless, decades of poor experiences with proprietary standards (or no standards at all) contrasted with…

There’s an idea that’s becoming increasingly popular here in Chapel Hill, and it’s expressed by one of two bumper stickers. The first is: Ignore Your Rights And They’ll Go Away The second is: No, You Can’t Have My Rights, I’m Still Using Them These apply equally well to the definition of Open Source software. For…

Three cheers for Alfresco for changing their license to the GPL. The first cheer is because they are shifting away from a license which, as a modified version of an OSI-approved license, was not, technically, Open Source as the OSI defines it. We all remember the days when high-flying technology companies reported “pro-forma” financials instead…

The Open Source Initiative is not the only organization with ideas about how to better understand, and thus develop and exploit software. At the opposite end of the spectrum seems to be The Progress and Freedom Foundation, and their Senior Fellow, James DeLong, who has just posted a new and thoroughly confusing article that appears…

The scientific community has developed theories that attempt to explain every phenomenon from Planck Scale (which is 1.616 x 10-35 m) to the size of the Universe (which is estimated to be at least 78 billion light years (or 7.38 x 1026 m). A minority group of people who demand to be called scientists have…

2006 was a pivotal year for Open Source. 2007 should be a banner year. In 2006, the OSI’s agenda was focused on the problem of license proliferation (defining it, addressing it, and solving it), the harmonization of the definitions of open standards and open source software, and the launch of the new, version 3.0 website,…

Dale Dougherty is giving his Make: presentation. Clearly, FOSS hackers are Make:rs. He referenced one of my favorite documents, the Crafter Manifesto, which can be found at http://ullamaaria.typepad.com/hobbyprincess/2005/03/draft_craft_man.html While craft and play may seem as far from technology as one can get, as human endeavors (and we /are/ human) I believe they are intimately related.

Greetings from Brussels, where EuroOSCON 2006 is in progress. Top of my OSI agenda is getting the new website launched. Progress on this task has been sporadic over the year, largely frustrated by the fact that it takes a certain amount of coordinate effort up front to make it possible to accumulate asynchronous effort later.…

The License Proliferation Committee is an ad-hoc advisory committee to the board. Many people are concerned that there are too many licenses of limited value. Yet other people ar concerned that policy concerns will cause open source licenses to be disapproved. The committee’s work has resulted in a recommendation to be published in draft form…