Via Ars Technica het bericht dat de Open Source Initiative (OSI) zich boos aan het maken is over wat zij ziet als misbruik van het woord “open source” voor software die dat helemaal niet is. Vroeger was dat nooit zo’n probleem:
once every 2-3 months we’d receive notice that some company or another was advertising that their software was “open source” when the license was not approved by the OSI board and, upon inspection, was clearly not open source. We (usually Russ Nelson) would send them a notice politely telling them “We are the Open Source Initiative. We wrote a definition of what it means to be open source, we promote that definition, and that’s what the world expects when they see the term mentioned. Do you really want to explain to your prospective customers ‘um…we don’t actually intend to offer you these freedoms and rights you expect?’.” And they would promptly respond by saying “Wow! We had no idea!” Maybe once or twice they would say “What a novel idea! We’ll change our license to one that’s approved by you!”. Most of the time they would say “Oops! Thanks for letting us know–we’ll promote our software in some other way.” And they did, until last year.
Het woord “open source” is geen geregistreerde merknaam (merkaanvraag 75439502 voor “open source” werd afgewezen want beschrijvend), en OSI heeft juridisch dus geen poot om op te staan. Maar OSI hoopt natuurlijk op de goede wil van de bedrijven die met open source werken.
Arnoud