The OSI is a non-profit organization founded in 1998 as the keeper of the Open Source Definition, a 10-point list of the criteria a software license should meet before it will be approved by the OSI.
However, as an increasing number of vendors claim to offer open source software despite using licenses that have not been OSI approved, OSI president Michael Tiemann has declared enough is enough.
Open Source has grown up. Now it is time for us to stand up, he wrote on the OSI’s official blog. I believe that when we do, the vendors who ignore our norms will suddenly recognize that they really do need to make a choice: to label their software correctly and honestly, or to license it with an OSI-approved license that matches their open source label.
There has been growing confusion as to whether some software vendors can claim to be open source providers, notably due to the Mozilla Public License plus Attribution approach taken by SugarCRM, as well as its Windows-based fork, SplendidCRM.
In January this year Tiemann challenged the OSI to reach a decision about whether modified forms of the OSI-approved Mozilla Public License that require n attribution, typically the logo of the author, to be applied to derivatives, should be approved by the OSI.
A decision on that has not been reached, but in the meantime there is less confusion about the Centric Public License used by Centric CRM. Although the company claims to provide the most advanced open source CRM its license does not permit redistribution in any form, or the distribution of derivative works.
These licenses are not open source licenses, said Tiemann, while calling on true open source supporters to only use the term when referring to software using OSI-approved licenses in order to pressure the vendors to either use another term or adopt an OSI-approved license.
Tiemann said the approach is necessary to maintain the reputation of the open source movement and retain the trust of users. We should never put the customer in a position where they cannot trust the term open source to mean anything because some company and their investors would rather make a quick buck than an honest one, or because they believe more strongly in their own story than the story we’ve been creating together for the past twenty years, he wrote. We are better than that. We have been successful over the past twenty years because we have been better than that. We have built a well-deserved reputation, and we shouldn’t allow others to trade the reputation we earned for a few pieces of silver.
