Time to stop the abuse of the term Open Source

I have been wanting to write about the abuse of the term Open Source. It is being abused in two different ways. In the first one, vendors release their software under a non OSI approved license and then call their software open source software. Typical example is the software SugarCRM. Finally, Michael Tiemann, president of Open Source Initiative, has woken up and he is planning to go after such abusers.

So here’s what I propose: let’s all agree–vendors, press, analysts, and others who identify themselves as community members–to use the term ‘open source’ to refer to software licensed under an OSI-approved license. If no company can be successful by selling a CRM solution licensed under an OSI-approved license, then OSI (and the open source movement) should take the heat for promoting a model that is not sustainable in a free market economy. We can treat that case as a bug, and together we can work (with many eyes) to discern what it is about the existing open source definition or open source licenses made CRM a failure when so many other applications are flourishing. But just because a CEO thinks his company will be more successful by promoting proprietary software as open source doesn’t teach anything about the true value of open source. Hey–if people want to try something that’s not open source, great! But let them call it something else, as Microsoft has done with Shared Source. We should never put the customer in a position where they cannot trust the term open source to mean anything because some company and their investors would rather make a quick buck than an honest one, or because they believe more strongly in their own story than the story we’ve been creating together for the past twenty years. We are better than that. We have been successful over the past twenty years because we have been better than that. We have built a well-deserved reputation, and we shouldn’t allow others to trade the reputation we earned for a few pieces of silver.

It is time for people to stop abusing the term open source (which, if you asked Richard Stallman, itself is an “abuse” of the term Free Software) and also to stop using the reputation of open source to strengthen their company’s reputation in the competitive market conditions. If any company wants to be a truly open source company, they have to release their products under one of the approved open source licenses. If you can’t release your software under an OSI approved license, start using terms like “shared source” (as Michael points out in his blog) or “wanted to be open source but” or “don’t have the heart to be open source”, etc. Just don’t claim that you are an open source company. It is time for OSI guys to go behind such companies and stop the abuse. If the companies don’t yield to the request, it is time to start a campaign educating people about such abuses. Probably, we can have a “Open Source Hall of Shame” website and add these companies to that list.

There is a second group of abusers (of the term Open Source). They are usually wannabe entrepreneurial geeks who use the term open source to leverage some press for them and then blatantly move away from their original promise. Activecollab is one such example. The geek behind the software touted it as an open source alternative to Basecamp, got quite a lot of press coverage and, then, used the coverage to build a huge audience for his software. He started off with GPL license and then brought in his own “open source” license version. Finally, he is now releasing a commercial version of the software with a toned down free version. I have no problem if he wanted to do a commercial basecamp like software. I will be more than happy to welcome him because it will bring in competition to Basecamp and such competition is good for the customers. But, he misused the term open source to get the PR (just do a google search for “Activecollab” and you can see how many blogs and other media sites have written about it) for his software and now shifting the license to a commercial version. That is, he is commercializing his product after gathering his audience with the open source carrot. There are many such incidents of blatant abuse of the term open source. It is time for us to raise the awareness of the general public about such abuses. It is time to create an environment where people cannot abuse the term open source and get away with it. It is time for such madness to end.

Update: SugarCRM has embraced GPLv3 after I wrote this article.