OSI Board Blog

This report is a summary of Zak Greant's Open Source Initiative activities for the week of March 23rd to 29th, 2008.

This Week

• Alolita Sharma, Andrew C. Oliver and I sent the draft infrastructure RFP to the board for review.
• Worked with the rest of the OSI team on developing the affiliate/membership/somethingship program.

This report is a summary of Zak Greant's Open Source Initiative activities for the week of March 16th to 22nd, 2008.

This report is a summary of Zak Greant's Open Source Initiative activities for the week of March 9th to 15th, 2008.

This Week

This was my first week of real activity in 2008 (except for my attendance of the March 2008 OSI face-to-face meeting.)

I wanted to give a quick shout out to our President, who was just listed as one of eWeek's Top Ten Open-Source Business Influencers. Wish they could've gotten a better picture, though...

An Information Week article published last week appears to position Microsoft as trying to do something right when it comes to open source. And it positions the open source community as being not quite ready to make nice after past insults, threats, and abuse.

Are you a patent holder, wondering how to write software which implements your patent? Here's my advice: Patents expire. Towards the end of the patent's lifetime, you want to be trying to transfer the patent's franchise over to the relationship between the patent-holder and the licensee. That can be done with closed-source software, but you risk competitors writing their own software. With Open Source software, as long as you manage the relationship with the user correctly, you end up with a franchise.

March 26 is Document Freedom Day (DFD). On March 26th, events and activities across the world will be held to promote adoption of free document formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF).

For any individual or organization, anywhere in the world, the right to share data without "lock-in" from vendors is as fundamental as the right to knowledge. Open standards and free document formats are integral to protecting this right for everyone.

This is the text of a comment I made on a blog posting by Matt Asay:

Matt,

Thanks for saying what I would have said. I'll go a few steps futher:

OOXML needs to die. It's clear that OOXML is a faux standard -- not because it's a vendor standard. There are lots of vendor-created standards which are real standards (e.g. PostScript). No, OOXML is a botch because it's expressed in terms of an undocumented Microsoft graphics library. OOXML is all "and then a miracle occurs". You've seen that cartoon, right?

Steve Ballmer asks, in an E*Week interview, who speaks for the Open Source Community, and answers his question by saying that nobody does. True enough! He then goes on to point out that Larry Ellison, he speaks for Oracle, yes. True enough! But who speaks for the proprietary software vendors? When we, the open source community, want to make an agreement with the proprietary software vendors, who do we talk to? Do we talk to Larry? Or Steve? Or Jonathan? Or Curley? Or Moe?