Andrew Oliver commented on my previous blog entry about OSI future, saying that he is interested in the idea of creating an enhanced certification. While waiting for more feedback – especially from other OSI Board members – I want to take a chance to tell more about this idea.
Jim Jagielski, Simon Phipps and Mark Radcliffe at OSBC unveiled OSI plan during the “A New OSI for a New Decade: Rebooting the Open Source Initiative OSI” session (presentation). Some reports stressed the importance of organizations, but volunteers are welcome too!
In Simon words:
I’m very interested in your idea of creating an enhanced certification. I’m not sure whether this should be part of the communications working group or some kind of marketing and branding or trademark working group. I also believe that we need a consumer focused marketing and branding effort.
Hi,
We at XWiki (http://www.xwiki.com and http://www.xwiki.org) would welcome and support any initiative to create additional certifications or labels for open source software.
We have seen too much variance between open source vendors in their involvement in Open Source and particularly over time. It’s easy to be commited to Open Source when you start and when you look for backing and support. But this commitment should be sustained over time.
Some business models of vendors lead to gradually less commitment to open source, while others show a strong commitment over time.
Many licences allow this (Double licences or very open licences), while others LGPL have great balance between freedom and long term commitment by all participants.
We believe at XWiki that we are very commited both in terms of business mode and in terms of licence (LGPL).
But indeed there is a lack of certification that actually makes it something visible to our community, users and clients. Many users don’t see the difference between a light commitment and a strong commitment, so how could they actually analyze if the vendors will “have to” commit over time or if it’s only be their own decision to continue their commitment to Open Source.
Labels that certify these commitments would be great !
Ludovic Dubost 5:14 pm on May 31, 2011 Permalink
The analogy is great ! In France we have tons and tons of such labels.
One of the most famous is the “label rouge” labels. It’s a very interesting label because many people think it means the product is “better”, while in reality it’s only a label that certify a “specific” process.
Whatever the certification, it can only be benificial for the community to know where each open source vendor is standing.
Clearly the current OSI validated licence is way to weak. We need to push for more complete certifications.