On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:06:56PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> I would be disappointed if this happened. The Open Source Initiative
> failed, for reasons that aren't important at this point - they should
> belatedly accept that and merge its corporation into SPI or another
> suitable continuing vehicle, rather than continue as an unseemly
> zombie organisation with its non-FOSS certification scheme that
Wow, that's quite a bold paragraph :)
I'm not sure what you mean with "failed", given that the organization
exists, has been active recently, and still is considered (ymmv, of
course) a reputable source for deciding which licenses are Free and
which are not (together with FSF and Debian, I dare to say). They seem
to have been inactive for a long while, as I mentioned. But that seems
to be changing right now and comes with the possibility for all
interested projects to join and shape the future of the organization.
I also don't understand the analogy you're making among SPI and OSI:
they pursue rather different goals.
> If we want to get involved in the important political battles more, we
> should support the older organisations, some of which we are already
> affiliated to.
As a matter of fact, there aren't that many organizations that both do
Free Software political battles and accept affiliation at the project
granularity. Most only accept individual memberships and donations ---
entirely legitimate ways of seeking for help, but not something we could
pursue as a project.
> Also, we're not exactly bestowing more support on our existing partner
> organisations than they could use, are we?
First of all, there is no mutual exclusion here. We're discussing this
opportunity here and now, because they've approached us now (and because
we're nice folks who consider and answer to proposals). We can discuss
other proposals in the future, without incompatibilities.
Then, I've some troubles instantiating the plural of your paragraph
above. The only organization I see that fits it is SPI. We're
contributing *a lot* to SPI: I've done that as Debian project liaison
for the past 2 years¹ and 7 out of 9 members of SPI board of directors
are Debian Developers. I also routinely call for Debian Developers to
get more active in SPI, because that would increase the quality of the
services they offer not only to Debian, but to all affiliated projects.
You seem to imply that affiliating to OSI would diminish our
participation in SPI. I fail to see the logic behind that implication.
Cheers.
[1] although only on matters related to the services that SPI's is
offering us, so you could argue it doesn't count as "contributing"
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
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Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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