New DivaBlog: Microsoft and Halloween

“This year the OSI has focused on expanding awareness of Open
Source by more purposefully serving the expanding international
open source movement. To that end, we’ve expanded our board to
include 4 members from outside North America. In this process, we
realized that the OSI Website is a valuable resource for
governments and others worldwide as they explore open source. In
order to be a credible resource, we received strong and consistent
feedback that focusing on the historical negative actions of a
single company, especially a globally prominent company which has
strong commercial positioning in every country, was not helpful.
Furthermore, it was leading to the false impression that open
source was all about amateur hackerism instead of a viable,
professional alternative to the traditional proprietary world of
software.

“We voted unanimously as a board in April 2005 to move
historical materials such as Eric Raymond’s ‘the Halloween
Documents’ and Michael Tiemann’s ‘A Case for Open Source’ to the
authors’ sites for maintenance and to re-focus our efforts on
increasing professionalism and credibility for both OSI and for
open source worldwide…”

Complete Story

Related Story:
Summit
Highlights Business Case for Open Source(Mar 10, 1999)