Who speaks for the Open Source Community?

Submitted by nelson on Thu, 2008-03-13 18:06
Steve Ballmer asks, in an E*Week interview, who speaks for the Open Source Community, and answers his question by saying that nobody does. True enough! He then goes on to point out that Larry Ellison, he speaks for Oracle, yes. True enough! But who speaks for the proprietary software vendors? When we, the open source community, want to make an agreement with the proprietary software vendors, who do we talk to? Do we talk to Larry? Or Steve? Or Jonathan? Or Curley? Or Moe? Pretty clearly, the thing that Ballmer thinks is a drawback of the Open Source community is also a drawback of the proprietary software community.

Comments

Submitted by OSI on Fri, 2008-03-14 01:51

Problem is, from Microsoft's perspective their is no proprietary software community. There is only Microsoft, and their minions.

Submitted by OSI on Fri, 2008-03-14 09:56

Looks quite obvious, a community that's not really a community but actually a loose form of companies trying to kill each other with the next strategic marketing move. As of the open source community, the fact that we are a community makes it a totally different thing. We can't give anyone the chance, or the voice, since in our community there are different opinions... Pretty much the same as the proprietary `community`, which has lots of different opinions too. If Microsoft, Ballmer, or any person be given the `voice` of the proprietary `community`, they won't be completely honest either. Next to which, who tells the open source community to have a voice to the proprietary part? All they need to do is their job (Killing each other off with marketing), and in the end, we will only be stronger. Attacking our community is (I think) quite the full time job, so if he wants to handle it, good luck... Let them struggle in the past century, we will move on... My 2 cents, CPF_

To promote and protect open source software and communities...

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.