Kosher but stinks.
That’s what I think of Microsoft using the OSI to rubber stamp their may-share licenses. It all boils down to this. Green is the new black, and open source is the new killer feature, and if you’re playing in the enterprise space, you better have it checkmarked on your feature list.
But there’s only three ways you can get it on a PowerPoint slide and still keep a straight face.
You can use a lot of open source software, which is a good idea because now you’re building on solid work, and putting your money where your mouth is. And it’s the easiest step from being user to becoming a contributor, and we want more of that. It’s also not an option for Redmond, their business model is based on eating their own dogs.
You can produce tons of it, or having produced, put it out there. That’s not Microsoft either. Which is fine, it works for some companies and not others, and if I was Microsoft I wouldn’t be giving away my lock-ins either. Let’s just say WallStreet does not reward you for being an upstanding citizen.
You can do some, but that just doesn’t cut it. Itemizing your open source lines of code doesn’t get you the coveted checkbox. Now you have two problems. You need to explain to the CEO what the free Outlook plugin you’re giving away does. Not going to happen. And you need to talk about the elephant: how much that discounted Exchange license will really cost the company. Itemizing is hard, people don’t get half pregnant.
Which leaves us with the third, and easiest option of all. Get you very own OSI-certified license. Act now, while supply lasts, and you can get two for the price of one!
You get instant “look, me too” cred, and you don’t have to sweat releasing any code. You’re certified now, the rest is implementation details. If you’re nice, you can throw out some unimportant code at the masses, or give your copy of what’s already free, and get a few free PRs.
Which in a nutshell is what this hoopla is about.
I’m not entirely clear what the OSI wants to do when it grows up, but if it’s about serving the community, then it needs to get out of the stamping business. Which, actually, has nothing to do with Microsoft, just a good opportunity to point out that the Emperor forgot to put on pants and it’s all hanging out.
And it ain’t pretty.
Vanity belongs on license plates. Open source is about removing friction, not creating a combinatorial complexity. Where can I share this code? What can I use together? Can I ship this overseas? Will the credits roll fit on a 40″ screen? Who decided to use this library without talking to legal first? How many contributor agreements is too much?
We need proof.
We need to know there’s a community interest behind the license, that it’s not to glorify the company or the project, but something that many members want, even better, need to use. That you exhausted all other options and amongst the MITs and BSDs and GPLs and CPLs and artists and what have you not, have not found a single license that could possibly work.
We need to stop the madness of licenses as marketing collateral. In this case, less is more.
And special thanks to Sun, SugarCRM and others for returning their vanity license plates to the DMV.