Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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What is the "Open Source Institute"? If you mean the Open Source Initiative, then yes, I have posted on open-source related topics here, yes, I am a member of the OSI (I joined... two weeks ago? mostly so I could vote for OSI board members who are committed to opposing corporate influence over the open source definition), and no, I do not have a conflict of interest. I paid the OSI $40 to join. I receive no money from the OSI; I certainly receive no money that Amazon donated to the OSI. I am not OSI staff, and I think the OSI only has one paid staff member. Saying there's a conflict of interest is like saying that individual ACLU members have a conflict of interest when speaking about a company that donates to the ACLU, or that Amazon Prime members have a conflict of interest when speaking about Amazon.

(I am, as it happens, rather opposed to Amazon as a company. I canceled my Prime membership; I try to shop anywhere else if possible; I celebrated the loss of NYC HQ2. But in this case, I think they're in the right.)

An Open Source advocacy group with cloud providers on their board, and cloud providers who pay them hundreds of thousands per year. Their mission is to be evangelists for their definition of Open Source. The one that benefits cloud providers.

Of course a lobby group like this should be transparent. But I don't expect a group like that with closed mailing lists to actually be Open.

I'm still not sure what group you're talking about. If you're talking about the Open Source Initiative, the description you're giving doesn't quite make sense: the board members of the Open Source Initiative are individuals, not organizations. Some of the individuals happen to be employed by Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc., but they don't seem to work in the cloud organizations and they're not representing their companies, anyway.

The total budget of the OSI is in the couple hundred thousand range, i.e., comparable to a single full-time software engineer. So the fact that a few companies are each giving five-digit donations that add up to a six-digit budget doesn't seem like it's a huge priority for any of these companies. Take a look at the sponsorship levels on https://opensource.org/sponsors .

In any case, I agree that the Open Source Initiative should be transparent, and my individual membership in the OSI is not an endorsement of everything the OSI does any more than having a PyCon ticket is endorsement of everything the Python Software Foundation or their corporate sponsors do. (One specific thing they haven't done is post form 990s more recently than 2016, and I do intend to ask them to post these. But if you look at the 2016 one https://opensource.org/files/2016990EZ.pdf you can see that these aren't vast sums of money, and Craigslist donated more money to the OSI than any cloud provider.)

Their definition is a branding of the Debian guidelines from 1998, not a ploy on behalf of AWS years later. What other definition should we be considering? I actually can't name any.

Edit: well, there's Microsoft's "Shared Source", but that's read-only if they like you, not particularly useful.

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