I pull a small news feed from ConsortiumInfo.org (in the left hand column). On a monthly basis they also produce a bulletin that covers some convergence of standards and other relevant topics. The March issue is all about "open" as it relates to standards and open source. Andy Updegrove provides a short collection of balanced articles and opinions as always. What provoked this issue was the protest letter from the open source community leadership on the new OASIS patent policy that I've also written about here.
The protest letter still bothers me. To be clear I am not refering to money with Corwin's Razor, so much as the desire of a group of people outside a community placing economic requirements on the community without actually contributing. Imagine for a moment any of the following scenarios: a collection of enterprises (think something like POSC, the Petroleum Open Systems Consortium) or comp. sci. academics (from CMU SEI) or lawyers (the U.S. National Society for Public Interest Law maybe) starting to go from OSS project community to OSS project community delivering an ultimatum that the customer wants to acquire only "professional" open source (for some group centric definition of professional) that must be licensed under the CPL (because it's clear about patent licensing rights and viral like the GPL) and the project must use subversion for all it's configuration management, and have module level documentation in Z notation to demonstrate its "correctness" in a "defensible" manner, for equally group centric definitions of correct and defensible. I can imagine the response to such an ultimatum from the leadership of any of the communities.
Updegrove's articles ask us to take the necessary steps to understand one another's points of view then start the dialog to at least learn from one another, and hopefully find the compromise positions (and rightly assumes there will be more than one). This is a community oriented idea if ever there was one.
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