Patrick Masson (@massonpj) is currently serving as the General Manager for the Open Source Initiative after working within higher education IT for over twenty years, ranging in roles from Programmer Analyst at UCLA, to Chief Technology Officer in the University of Massachusetts' Office of the President.Patrick also teaches within the College of Computing and Information at the State University of New York at Albany on subjects related to open source software.Patrick has worked to promote the awareness and adoption of open source throughout his career, serving on the Jasig Foundation's Board of Directors, and is currently on the Apereo Foundation's Advisory Council. He is the co-founder and current chair of the EDUCAUSE Constituency Group on Openness and author of the Openness Index.
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Of course there is this catchy tune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ-s3DRZJKY
Mark,
At the Open Source Initiative (OSI) we're seeing more and more discussions, and developments like this, within agencies around adoption: specificity creating policy for government (local through national) procurement. All great news.
Interestingly, this success is creating a few problems. While motivated for all the right reasons--as you've noted above--many folks in government are not aware of the growing misuse of the label "open source software." Indeed it is understandable that for many who are new to the open source movement, they may not have the experience to assess what does and does not comply with the Open Source Definition (http://opensource.org/osd), and thus the risks in adoption of software that is only labelled "open source."
The issue is, as policies like this begin to emerge across the public sector, unscrupulous organizations have begun to brand their products as "open source," but apply licenses that do not actually guarantee software freedom. Open-washing and fauxpen source software is a growing problem (https://opensource.com/business/14/12/openwashing-more-prevalent), and well-meaning government departments might be duped into believing they are engaging with authentic open source projects, but actually dealing with clever marketers.
This is why the OSI reached out to the Government of India (GOI) on this very matter, to suggest that they specifically state in their policy (http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/policy_on_adoption_of_…) that open source software is any software distributed with an OSI Approved Open Source License.
We were very happy to discover when the GOI responded, noting their "Framework For Adoption of Open Source Software In e-Governance Systems," includes:
"Open Source Software is also commonly known as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), or Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). Here the “Free” refers to “Freedom to use” and not “Free of Charge”; similarly, “Open Source” refers to the “Availability of Source code” for the community / adopter / end-user to study and modify the software and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified software (without having to pay royalties to previous developers). The definitions of Free Software and Open Source are made available by Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative respectively."
Unfortunately, while many OSI Approved Licenses are noted and described in that document, it does not specifically reference the OSI's Approved Licenses (http://opensource.org/licenses). This still leaves the door open (hmm, maybe "ajar" is a better word here) to those who distribute software under other non-OSI approved licenses and then simply include the "open source" label in their communications and marketing.
This is not a theoretical problem, and I can personally think of two examples:
1. Qabel: "Qabel is a free, open-source (not in accordance with the OSI) and expandable platform" (qabel) and carries a license that could impose serious limits on its use by a government.
2. SailfishOS: "Your tablet is powered by open source software called Sailfish" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBQdfcLhts8 minute 1:05).
Governments (or any organization) that want to ensure that they are truly benefiting from software freedom, should ensure that the software under consideration carries an OSI Approved Open Source License.
Patrick