Re: [DRAFT 3]: Charter for the Open Source Committee

On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 04:01:26PM -0600, Ean R . Schuessler wrote:
> The Open Source trademark was originally registered by Bruce Perens
> for the SPI corporation and the opensource.org domain was likewise
> reserved by SPI. SPI then named Eric as the manager for the project.
> After that a whole series of curious events occured that included the
> attrition of 3/4 of the SPI board to the new formed OSI project. In
> this whole muddle, however, no one took the time to cross t's and dot
> i's in any real organized way. As a result, the only tangible effect
> of the SPI/OSI meltdown was to move some people off one board and onto
> another. So, I guess you and the other members of OSI may be a bit
> suprised that SPI brushed itself off and reconstituted itself out of
> the ranks of its membership, but I don't see why you should be.

The way I'd characterize the events you just described is:

The several (most) members of the SPI board quit and formed the OSI.
However, they didn't do much about the Open Source mark till after
this event (and even then their primary actions were upset messages and
refusal to complete the registration which was in process). However,
the OSI has been very good about stating what it wants to do, while the
SPI is considerably less outspoken.

[Or, more simply, OSI was created in a temper tantrum. But that's my
personal opinion and might be offensive.]

I *like* Russell's concept of OSI and SPI working together on this, and
hope that this can happen.

--
Raul is not a member of the board of either OSI or SPI, but is a Debian
developer and so is affiliated with SPI.