I follow news and developments within the open source community with a keen personal and professional interest, but it wasn’t until recently that I observed a disturbing pattern emerging. It seems that the open source values and ideals are not only being cynically exploited by large proprietary vendors, but those vendors are continuing to get away with it.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand that many open source products are money making machines that fiercely compete with platforms like Windows, as well as with each other. But when a group of companies bands together to try to define the future of openness, but do so in a non-open way that excludes some players and just promotes themselves, well, that sends shudders down my spine.
Open Forum Europe (OFE) seem to do just that. Their upcoming annual summit “The Future is Open” partly reads like an event organized in support of Opera’s case against Microsoft. However, even if I can let that slide, despite my strong belief in the need to talk to rather than sue companies into submission, I cannot ignore the fact that attendance to the event is “by invitation only”. Hardly open, I would argue.
In addition, and this is not limited to OFE, it seems that the debate about what constitutes openness has been frozen in time. Everybody talks about the principles of openness – in the case of OFE, they mention flexibility, interoperability, avoidance of vendor lock-in, ensuring access to information and a level playing field, etc. But why don’t these principles apply to OFE’s members?
What about services? What about systems? What about algorithms? For OFE members, these are all proprietary. Thinking about whether any of the above mentioned principles apply to IBM’s mainframe marketjust leaves my head spinning. And this is the same IBM that recently masterminded the “Open Cloud Manifesto” – behind closed doors and with participation by invitation only. Again, hardly open.
OFE years ago announced an initiative called “Certified Open”. Nothing much ever came out of it apparently, but perhaps now is the time to revisit it and apply it to the organization’s own membership. On the other hand, given the recent stance of the organization, some very powerful business powers have probably decided that Certified Open is a threat to their positioning. Why would OFE actually want to be open?
Regards, Per
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