Open Source Initiative at OSCON

According to their blog, the Open Source Intiative (OSI) is holding a public meeting at OSCON on Thursday July 3 at 7:30pm. I’ve been wondering what has transpired since they issued their statement on license proliferation back in April:

Interference between different open-source licenses is now perceived as a sufficiently serious problem that OSI has become as a victim of its own earlier success… The day of the open-source license as tribal flag or corporate monument will have to come to a close.

I thought those were hopeful words when I read them, but it’s been pretty quiet since then. No doubt there’s a relation – whether cause or effect I don’t know – to recent structural and leadership changes.

There are a lot of real issues with license conflicts (q.v. the MySQL and PHP5 situation), but there’s a lot of FUD too, and the crazy number of different licenses facilitates it. It would be nice to see someone take the lead in cleaning things up a bit.