[ Thanks to E5Rebel
for this link. ]
“OSI was formed in 1998 to solve a pressing problem. The
founders embraced the ideals of software freedom, but saw that
businesses – being non-persons – lacked any way to embrace a
philosophical principle. To advance software freedom, it needed to
be pragmatically ‘projected’ onto the surface of the computer
industry of 1998. The result was a focus on a certain kind of
advocacy, plus an enormously valuable effort to analyse, categorise
and selectively endorse copyright licenses. OSI was the pragmatic
projection of software freedom onto the computer industry of
1998.“But in 2010, the industry has changed. It’s due in no small
part to the effects of software freedom on technology and
innovation, with the pragmatic liberties it guarantees seeding
today’s key trends. It’s also in part due to the attempted
corruption of open standards and the policies that rely on them,
which has allowed proprietary software an undeserved ascendancy. So
while new businesses are able to be formed with philosophical and
ethical principles embedded in their DNA, existing ones still can’t
’embrace software freedom’ since that’s a capability only of
intelligent individuals.”