oscon: day 1 - who decides what open source means

well the next session block had some to choose from.  i decided one of these was going to be my choice:

• who gets to decide what open source means
• open design, not by committee
• cross platform .net with mono
• open source voting

i saw the .net/mono one was in the product/services track, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but usually means that it has a product twist on it.  frank w/novell is presenting on it, and maybe i'll try to poke in.

ultimately i chose to go with the 'who gets to decide...' one as i look at the panel.  i've met brian behlendorf before and wanted to see what the panel had to say about this topic.

in 1998 when open source was coined as a term, free software already existed.  the term 'free software' caused confusion (free as in no $ or free as in no liberty).  this movement helped coined the open source term.

"now sun is pretty much a free and open source licensing company" -- hmm...pretty sweeping statement.

who is the OSI?  an open process and community discussing licensing issues.   when a new license is proposed, they start a conversation about it.  the board/committee meets and decides -- open process with the submitter on ensuring OSD compliance, etc.

current discussion on gplv3 (SugarCRM supporting this license).  chris dibona has some issue with gplv3, not because of some details, but ensuring that something called open source complies with the open source definition.

ross mayfield has a company (social text) who used a mozilla license with some modified clauses...caused some issues with some in the community, a result of a passionate community.  "users are becoming developers" in certain ways...interesting thought.  ross refers to the blog post about 'will the real open source crm please stand up' and how socialtext stopped calling themselves open source until their process was vetted through the community.  social text has the common public attribution license == mozilla+.  michael just announced that this attribution license submitted by social text (CPAL) is approved and the ink is drying as we speak.

micheal suggests we look at the history page of the definition of open source on wikipedia.  he says "terrifying."

in the definition of open source is it about the OSI maintaining its reputation? 

this is some interesting discussion but perhaps way too philisophical for this time of day or my technical dweeb mind ;-).  end of panel -- do we have an idea of who gets to decide?  i'm still confused.

i'm looking forward to bill hilf's discussion during tomorrow morning's general session...stay tuned.