Bruce Perens campaigns to join the OSI
Bruce Perens wants to be an OSI board member. That's fine. But he also seems to want to engage in scorched earth political campaigns to get there. That's not so fine.
Bruce claims that the OSI is over-represented with vendors and, populist that he is, wants to return power to the "people" (i.e., developers). I can appreciate this. I made the same point about the Linux Foundation when it was formed from the ashes of the FSG and OSDL.
But this is where Bruce's candidacy loses some of its potency. To merit a board role, Bruce must show that he's for more than he's against, and he must show that he has actually done something for open source in the recent past. From his post we know that he's against Microsoft joining the OSI, but this is a strawman, as is his fight against special (corporate) interests channeling the OSI's energies. But tilting at strawmen isn't enough to justify an OSI board role.
As an outgoing board member, and perhaps the most corporate of the bunch, I wanted to respond specifically to Bruce's insinuations. In so doing, I'm speaking as Matt Asay, and not for the OSI.
I have served on the OSI board for a few years now. In that time I have been frustrated by the board's lack of corporatism, not its alleged predilection for corporate interests. Ask some of the open-source companies who have tried to get OSI to take positions favorable to them on attribution (badgeware) and other topics, and they'll concur. The OSI is, if anything, not corporate enough. Bruce's claim completely misses the mark here.
Yes, the OSI's board is overwhelmingly comprised of people who work for companies like IBM, Intel, Red Hat, etc. But so are Linux, Apache, etc. That's the nature of the open-source beast in the 21st Century, for better or for worse. I think it's for the better and suspect the communities I mentioned would concur.
Despite these corporate affiliations, however, my own experience with the OSI board is that its board of directors is influenced by exactly one thing: the good of open source. I have never heard one statement from Michael Tiemann, Danese Cooper, etc. that smacks of corporate jingoism or otherwise is anything less than they would be saying if their employer were Richard Stallman (or Bruce Perens, for that matter). This is not a group of people voting with their paychecks.
His suggestion that even Microsoft (gasp!) could be given a board seat is more egregiously wrong. I think I'm the only one of the OSI board who has ever seriously considered that an option, and it's one that Microsoft's recent actions have pushed me to reject. I don't have anything against Microsoft other than what it does on a routine basis (Engage in practices designed to lock customers in, not liberate them). The day it changes these is the day I'd gladly welcome it in, were I still on the board (which I won't be).
But I'm a minority voice on this. Most of the OSI board members have been around long enough to have been burned by Microsoft at least a few times, and aren't going to embrace Redmond anytime soon. Bruce's suggestion to the contrary is a populist canard.
On license proliferation, I tend to agree with Bruce. But it's not clear how he'd do any better, and it's equally unclear why he can't do more good as an outside agitator than as an insider.
My primary question for Bruce, however, is this: "What has he done for open source lately?" Like some other early heavies in the open-source movement, he gets a lot of credit for a reputation built a decade ago, and that's fine. However, one can't rest on past laurels when campaigning for a present-day role./p>
The OSI needs a vibrant membership of those currently shaping the open source landscape. It's possible that its current make-up doesn't reflect this. Point well taken. But it's equally possible - indeed, I'd say probable - that Bruce's directorship wouldn't change this. I like Bruce but aside from the occasional picketing he does, I can't point to anything substantive he has done for open source in the past half-decade or so.
Perhaps this would be a chance for Bruce to shine again. Perhaps. But my own personal view is that Michael Tiemann et al. better represent open source than Bruce does.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
In other words: it's easy to criticise any system created by man as, being the product of inherently flawed creatures, it can never be completely free of flaws itself, but unless you can produce a less flawed system there comes a point when all you're doing is criticising without contributing any positive or doing anything to solve the problems you see. It's a lot of negative sniping without any serious contribution to making things any better.
Thanks for saying what I would have said. I'll go a few steps futher:
1. The OSI nominates people to the board *despite* their corporate affiliations, not because of them. The idea that the OSI would elect a "Microsoft" board member is as absurd as the idea that we'd elect a "Google" board member or an "IBM" board member. We elect people based on their own merits, not the merits (or demerits) of the companies or organizations they are affiliated with.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, when a company sponsors a project that allows an individual to really shine--to show great open source leadership, vision, communication skills, etc., then we may nominate based on what that individual has done. But never based on the company's sponsorship of the project.
2. Moreover, we work hard to create even the *appearance* of corporate favoritism. The industry analysts are now fairly consistent in calling Red Hat the leading open source company, and based on the most recently reported revenue numbers, Red Hat does earn approximately 5x its closest rival. (Disclaimer: I do work for Red Hat, but that affiliation does not color this objective fact.) If the OSI were remotely representative of corporate interests, it would have at least two board members, if not more. But we have made the decision to not nominate some really, really great open source leaders from Red Hat precisely because we do not want to give the appearance of corporate favoritism. Thus, while we require individual, not corporate merit, merit alone is not sufficient.
I have seriously considered resigning my position in order to give others at Red Hat a chance to serve. And I may yet do that in the future.
3. In terms of what Bruce Perens has or has not done for open source. He claims to have solved the license proliferation problem by elegant means, which is wonderful to hope for. But when Bruce was invited to participate in our license proliferation process as a member of the public, he refused. He would do no work without special title and recognition. And I don't have a problem with that--many people won't even show up to work without a guaranteed salary of over $1M, with options and bonuses that can total hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars if lucky. That's the free market at work. What I do have a problem with is that the work of the committee in 2005-2006 showed that elegance does not survive politics well, and that all attempts to create an elegant solution were strongly shouted down by influential members of the open source community (and license stewards of significant open source licenses). To make a claim of a great solution without saying what the solution is, and without subjecting that solution to the kind of peer review that is Open Source smacks of the same kind of tactics we see when a company claims to own 235 patents that are infringed by Linux. It's all assertion and no facts.
If Bruce had participate in the license proliferation committee and had won the day with his elegant argument, he might well be president of the OSI today. But at this point his claims of solution are no stronger than Eric Raymond's presumptive claims at the start of the process that there should be only 3-4 licenses and all others should be deprecated.
Matt, we're sorry you'll be retiring from the board, but keep up the great blog!
In one day, my campaign has gained over 1300 signatures at http://techp.org/p/7 So, not everybody agrees with you. I ask for the public to continue to sign on to my campaign there.
I understand that you would be frustrated by the OSI board's perceived lack of corporatism. The problem is not really corporatism, it's the difference between software vendors who place their Open Source product in a profit-center, and those who co-develop software to use it rather than sell it. The second camp represent the majority of Open Source developers and users, and also include the world's largest corporations among their number. So, please do not label me anti-corporate.
Obviously the purpose of the election is to put new board members - including those from various vendors, on the board. Unfortunately OSI isn't telling us who, other than me, is a candidate. Indeed, election information is so unavailable to those outside the OSI board that we don't even know the election's date. Thus, it is understandable that I fear the worst. I am overjoyed to hear it's not happening this election, but I want to be there to vote against it in the election next year. Besides being a current OSI board member, you have leadership in the Open Source Business Conference where Microsoft will give the keynote speech. Shouldn't I have been worried?
Regarding the license proliferation committee, I asked to be seated on the committee (and just being seated is no "special title and recognition", shame on you Mike) and was refused - which was just silly. I had the choice of feeding the legitimacy of what I saw as an arbitrary and non-representative organization by participating in it as a supplicant, at that point, or refusing to offer it whatever legitimacy it would gain from my own presence.
You relate that Eric Raymond could see at the initiation of the license proliferation committee what many others can if they do the work - that only a few licenses are necessary to achieve all business (and non-business) purposes in Open Source, and that those few licenses can be chosen to be compatible with each other so that we have no combinatorial problem between projects. And although the committee all knew that, they couldn't get the job done because "elegance does not survive politics well". It doesn't??? Perhaps elegance does not survive a lack of strong leadership well. I'd like to give elegance another try. Even if it can't ever be the official OSI recommended license set, we have the duty to promote a minimal license set and start to solve the problem.
You ask what I've done for you lately. Several years ago, I decided to concentrate on outward-facing activities of Open Source rather than internal ones, because that was where we needed the most help. One of the hardest problems has been the incessant fear campaign led against Linux and Open Source. Linux Foundation won't speak, from legal fears or because their steering board are partners of the main FUD producer. The director of their predecessor OSDL actually made a public statement in favor of the Novell-Microsoft agreement while I led its opposition. I represented Open Source at the U.N. World Summit. I led the publicity counter-offense against SCO, exposing that their then primary piece of "copied software" was a publicly-available product of the U.S. Government, and that they'd forgotten. I evangelized Open Source to heads of state, governments, corporations, and people everywhere, taking time away from my family. I had peer-reviewed work on Open Source published in engineering, economics, and law.
So, I've not been idle. But I didn't show up at the Open Source Business Conference, so Matt didn't notice.
Both of the main points in my campaign propose constructive solutions, so I think your painting them as mere criticism is just a rhetorical device. It's not useful to propose a solution without a problem statement.
OSI's current duty is pretty narrow: hold the line on the definition of Open Source, and manage the license approval process. My constructive proposal, Matt, is to go ahead with work against license proliferation that was sidetracked by politics. Not by disapproving licenses, but by recommending a set and strongly evangelizing that set. Please help me achieve that goal.
Many Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce:
"Regarding the license proliferation committee, I asked to be seated on the committee (and just being seated is no "special title and recognition", shame on you Mike) and was refused - which was just silly."
Rubbish. Your messages hinted strongly that you felt you were *entitled* to be on that committee. If you were, then so were *many* other people. Your request was made late in the process, after the selections had essentially all been made. The committee was kept limited in size deliberately, and decisions about who should and should not be on it were *not* made by the OSI board, but by the committee and/or its chair (who was not an OSI director). The board simply supported the decisions of the people who were closest to the issue; we did not interfere.
When your request (almost demand) to be on the committee was declined, rather than contributing in any way at all, you instead took your ball and went home -- making loud and rude comments the while. That doesn't seem to show as much concern for the issue of licence proliferation as it does for your name being on the committee.
Since that aspect of your remarks is so at variance with my experience and the messages I've just re-read, I put little credence in the rest of your comments.
- by BrucePerens March 19, 2008 5:57 PM PDT
- Ken, I was indeed outraged at being kept off of that committee and felt that the best action I could take after that was to turn my back upon it. But the bottom line is that the committee - despite its careful construction - was not able to take any action. I'd be glad to take part of the blame for that, had I been admitted to the process. I participated in another, more controversial activity: the W3C Patent Policy Working Group. It came to a useful conclusion despite the contentious and political nature of the problem - with one major member (Philips) walking off of W3C due to the decision. But they got a useful policy, and royalty-free standards are seen often outside of W3C because of it. Ken, it's time to approach the license proliferation matter again. Rather than dredge up old arguments about when I was able to apply, how are you going to solve the problem that still exists? Please, not just by saying "we tried once, and failed". Regarding my candidacy, OSI's board, through its president, asked me to show an uprising of strong community support if the board was to to elect me. I have. Now that I have done what you asked, are you going to hide behind complaints about my campaign, which is really quite mild in its criticism and is in no way the "scorched earth" that Matt refers to, or are you going to do what you said? If you OSI can't handle a political opponent on my laid-back scale, you'd only looking for yes-men.
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