Sun Exec Proposes Software Freedom Definition and Vendor Scorecard
by Lisa Hoover - Oct. 09, 2009Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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In a series of recent posts, our own John Mark Walker has been discussing the viability of open source business models and what the term "open core" really means to the FOSS community. He makes several great points and calls out the increasingly common practice of companies "turning open source efforts into a viral marketing play, when it can be so much more."
Given the competitive nature of business, it's probably too much to ask the commercial software development industry to be self-policing and put an end to calling a product "open source" simply because it uses an OSI-approved license. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, thinks it's time to hold vendors' feet to the fire and make them prove themselves to be true supporters of the open source community. He has a plan.
"To address this," writes Phipps, "I'm proposing the Open Source Initiative go beyond the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition to devise some sort of a Software Freedom Definition which articulates a holistic vision of software freedom against which businesses can be benchmarked. I propose also creating a self-certified score-card which companies can complete to indicate the approach they are taking to promote software freedom as part of their business model - maybe 'the Open Source Audit'."
Phipps envisions the score card would have specific yes-or-no questions about community governance, community-controlled trademarks, and other benchmark qualities that help determine a company's true openness. "Suppliers could then state 'This product achieves 4 stars on the 10-point Open Source Audit' as they self-certify. In addition, procurement policies could then state they required a minimum number of stars for products and services they procure. And the only companies that could claim to be 'an open source business' would have all products scoring 10/10 - probably very, very few. A focus on software freedom - the code, rather than the company - is the answer to the issue."
How far would Phipps' idea go toward holding companies accountable? What kinds of questions should be included in the scorecard? Talk about it in the comments.
Flickr image courtesy of johnmarchan.Comments
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