Honest question; what does OSI actually do? I am involved with a number of OS projects and not once has OSI come up in any context, be it compliance, governance, education and so on.
They own the trademark of "Open Source" and use it to exercise a right to define which licences are truly open source. Now, I guess they are becoming involved in the question of what it means for an AI model to be open source, hence the politicking
Previously, if your project used one of the main OS licences you were good as far as they were concerned. They mainly existed to avoid lawyers coming up with licenses that water down the rights an open source license provides.
This is trivial to look up. They do not in fact own the trademark "open source". Apparently I can't share a direct link to uspto search results, but you can search by owner and see they have 7 trademarks, none of which are for the term "open source".
They own the trademark "Open Souce Initiative," which they say you can use with no advanced written permission if you follow all specific guidelines, including:
> the use of the term “Open Source” is used solely in reference to software distributed under OSI Approved Licenses. [1]
So you can refer to any software as "Open Source," regardless of their definition. But, if you call a piece of software "Open Source" alongside the use of the Open Source Initiative's trademark, then you must also use their definition of "Open Source," unless you otherwise have written permission.
They do not own the Open Source trademark. They tried to trademark "open source", but the USPTO denied the application. Since then, they've worked at convincing the public that OSS means anything with a license approved by the OSI. This too is not so. For example, SQLite, arguably the most successful OSS tool ever built, is not covered by an OSI license and doesn't intend to be.
SQLite has been dedicated to the public domain, ostensibly removing all copyright restrictions. Technically, it has no license for the OSI to list as an OSI license.
In more concrete terms: they're the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD), which is a rather explicit, but still subject to interpretation, list of criteria to decide if a particular software license is, or is not, "really Open Source". This is very important in the context of "Open Source washing" that is still a thing, and was even more important a decade or two ago, when there was a Cambrian explosion of licenses which claimed to be Open Source.
They review licenses, and act as a sort of PR team for the Free Software movement. The whole point is to make Free Software not seem too scary to businesses.
In that context it is important to differentiate Free from Open Source software.
The OSI is specifically built with a different vision from the FSF.
Free software, shall always be free, with almsource and ideally all derived works.
Open Source wants the code to be spread and for that allows inclusion with commercial software. (i.e. Microsoft was able to take open source TCP/IP stacks from BSD (BSD License) and integrate with Windows 95. That wouldn't have worked with a GPL Free Software implementation. (Even LGPL)
The supporting argument there is: By allowing that Microsoft's implementation was fully compatible to the rest of the world instead of having "bugs" (purposely?) in their own implementation, which would limit interoperability.
The free software argument is that they now took the code and closed it, not giving users a freedom to review (verify) and fix themselves. Which allowed Windows to play in TCP world instead of being an outsider.
No. "Free Software" is a term created by RMS/FSF. "Open Source" was later "formalized" by OSI to differentiate.
FSF puts it this way:
> Another group uses the term “open source” to mean something close (but not identical) to “free software.” We prefer the term “free software” because, once you have heard that it refers to freedom rather than price, it calls to mind freedom. The word “open” never refers to freedom.
And yes, the term "open source" predates OSI, but till OSI didn't have any specific definition and was slightly different for everybody. OSI created a mostly accepted definition whoch is distinct from FSF's Free Software definition.
If so, I think they made their point alr? I mean, this list is completly riddled to the brim with companies that use open-source! https://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsors
Previously, if your project used one of the main OS licences you were good as far as they were concerned. They mainly existed to avoid lawyers coming up with licenses that water down the rights an open source license provides.