OSI enforcement?

[Robin 'Roblimo' Miller]

Philippe Verdy wrote:
> Robin 'Roblimo' Miller [mailto:robin at roblimo.com]
>   
>> Moot in any case. The service mark is easier to protect, and I believe
>> the moral/branding force is more important than legality here.  A nice
>> jingle with the tagline/close "OSI... means freedom" would do more good
>> than 1000 lawyers dictating briefs to 10,000 legal secretaries at an
>> hourly rate of 500 EU/hour.
>>     
>
>
> If OSI would mean "freedom", I would applaude this, if at least the OSI
> movement could reconcile its positions with the FSF. I do belive that
> there's much more to gain by rejoining the two movements, and put an end to
> the split that occurred in the past, most propably motivated by some hidden
> supporters of proprietary licencing schemes that tried to divide the common
> interests, and infiltrate some doubts and fears within the spirit of
> deciders in organizations.
>   

I think the problem here is dogmatic, intractable people who would
rather argue than compromise, not "hidden supporters of proprietary
licencing schemes."

I note that you don't believe the FSF is supposed to do any of the
reconciling. Whatever.  (shrug) I have far too much work to do to allow
myself to get bogged down in an endless, point-by-point discussion, and
I'm sure you're smarter and better-informed than I will ever be, so you
win this one by default.

- Robin "back to lurking" Miller


> We can see now how this split is damageable, and how the proprietary
> licencing supporters are trying to defeat the free and open-source movement
> by legal threats: they have largely supported the unification of all rights
> related laws into a single expression "intellectual property rights" and
> they have won what they were looking for, because now they have
> international treaties and laws throughout the world to support the concept.
>
> Our best protection is to join our efforts and get the same level of
> protection, using the same arguments and legal terminology to protect our
> free open source licences, and protect our authors and our users against
> unjustified legal harassment (if you look into the main motivation of GPLv3,
> it's clear that this is in reaction to the ongoing tightening of binds
> between all these rights under the WIPO treaties, or European EUDC
> directives and their national legal implementation and ratification
> instruments.)
>
> I can understand that open source supporters and free software supporters
> are quite frightened about joining the forces (because any legal defeat
> could impact the whole movement). But doing nothing is certainly as much
> frightening and deserves the same legal weakening of our licences,
> threatened now by indirect rights (notably patents and trademark laws,
> because of the various international equivalences that are being made to
> bind these rights together; this has already occurred within the protection
> space of domain names, and I see no reason why these bindings would stop
> proliferating now).
>
> Already, the "public domain" is severely affected, and laws have been passed
> with retroactive effects in US and Russia. There's an attempt now to do to
> the "open source" or "free software" the same damaging thing that has been
> done to the public domain (and if you look more closely in the history of
> "open source" or "free software", the creation of licences was already a
> reaction to the complications and insecurity of the public domain, because
> of the increasing volume of laws bound now to the author's right and
> copyright, those association being protected and recognized now
> internationally under WIPO's treaties and their ratification by its
> signatory member states (even if not everything has still been implemented
> in national law, these will unavoidingly happen).
>
>
>
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