Bruce Perens rejected from license-proliferation committee.

[Russell Nelson]

Ian Lance Taylor writes:
 > It will take those people a lot more digging to understand that
 > there is no real feedback mechanism from the community to the OSI.

You realize that I merely have to reply to this email to falsify this
statement?  It doesn't matter what I say.  I could say "flibberty
flobberty foo" and I still prove you wrong.

 > Why shouldn't the OSI seek to be more open to the community which
 > it claims to represent?

Yes, we ought to reply to people's email.

(Ian, thanks for sending these softball objections.  The check is in
the mail.)

 > Besides, restaurants are a lousy analogy, since there are many
 > restaurants, but only one OSI.

There's the FSF.  There's OSDL.  There's OMM, AES, and NFLX.  Oh,
wait, those are stocks that I own, but you know what I mean.

 > Nobody voted for RMS or Eben.  But that's OK, because they don't claim
 > to represent anybody except themselves.

One of the reasons that I stay on the OSI board is that I feel that I
am the only representative of the individual self-supporting
developer.  I am representative without anybody having voted for me.
Why do people put such stock in voting?  Democratic representation is
no guarantee of quality of governance.

 > Do you really not see the difference between the FSF, which is
 > "dedicated to promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy,
 > modify, and redistribute computer programs," and the OSI, which is
 > "dedicated to managing and promoting the Open Source Definition for
 > the good of the community?"

Not particularly.  There are differences which I refuse to go into,
but this is an area in which we both claim to be representing the
interests of people we've never met.

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