OPEN SOURCE
When Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond founded the Open Source Initiative last year, the longtime free software advocates seemed uniquely positioned to negotiate the tension between cooperative software development and aggressive product marketing. The duo had already registered Open Source as a certification mark, and they vowed to "both safeguard the hacker community's interest and make the Open Source [brand] attractive to software producers." Netscape, Apple, and other companies licensed Open SourceTM, believing it could help them sell software.
Then Perens abruptly quit, citing Raymond's decision to license the trademark to technical book publisher O'Reilly & Associates for its Open Source Summit, at which non-open-source products would be displayed. Of course, it didn't help that CEO Tim O'Reilly participates in the open source movement in part because it helps him sell technical manuals. Now that the dust has settled, we asked Perens and Raymond if there's room for both hackers and execs in the open source movement.
Wired: Bruce, what happened?
Perens: All the vendors had been great about respecting the trademark, except for O'Reilly. Then Eric Raymond overrides the OSI board by encouraging O'Reilly to use the certification mark for an upcoming expo at which non-open-source software would appear.
Raymond: I simply told O'Reilly that OSI would not require them to gag anyone at the Open Source Summit.
Isn't this argument about the identity of Open SourceTM?
Perens: There's a middle ground between free software and rampant Microsoft-like commercialism. The Open Source Initiative used to occupy that ground. If you listen to Eric now, he's changed his tune: I just want to have software that doesn't suck. Eric has been seduced.
Raymond: It's important to keep an eye on the goal, better software, rather than on the particular means, open source. Most of us are cool with IBM and Sun being in the game. The anticommercial minority is just marginalizing itself.
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