Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2020/07/09/org-proliferation.html

[ This blog post
was cross-posted
from the blog at Software Freedom Conservancy where I work. ]

I’ve been concerned this week about aggressive negative reaction (by some)
to the formation of an additional organization to serve the Free and Open
Source (FOSS) community. Thus it seems like a good moment to remind
everyone why we all benefit when we welcome newcomer organizations
in FOSS.

I’ve been involved in helping found many different organizations —
in roles as varied as co-founder, founding Board member, consultant, spin-off
partner, and “just a friend giving advice”. Most of these
organizations fill a variety of roles; they support, house, fiscally sponsor,
or handle legal issues and/or trademark, copyright, or patent matters for
FOSS projects. I and my colleagues at Conservancy speak regularly about why
we believe a 501(c)(3) charitable structure in the USA has huge advantages,
and you can find plenty of blog posts on our site about that. But you can
also find us talking about how 501(c)(6) structures, and other structures
outside the USA entirely, are often the right choices — depending on
what a FOSS project seeks from its organization. Conservancy also makes our
policies, agreements, and processes fully public so that organizations can
reuse our work, and many have.

Meanwhile, FOSS organizations must
avoid the classic
“not
invented here” anti-pattern. Of course I believe that
Conservancy has great ideas for how to help FOSS, and our work
— such as fiscal sponsorship, GPL enforcement work, and the
Outreachy internship program — are the highest priorities in FOSS. I
also believe the projects we take under our auspices are the most important
projects in FOSS today.

But not everyone agrees with me, nor should they. Our Executive Director,
Karen Sandler, loves the aphorism “let a thousand flowers
bloom”. For example, when we learned of the launch
of Open Collective, we at
Conservancy were understandably concerned that since they were primarily a
501(c)(6) and didn’t follow the kinds of fiscal sponsorship models and
rules that we preferred, that somehow it was a “threat” to
Conservancy. But that reaction is one of fear, selfishness, and
insecurity. Once we analyzed what the Open Collective folks were up to, we
realized that they were an excellent option for a lot of the projects that
were simply not a good fit for Conservancy and our model. Conservancy is
deeply steeped in a long-term focus on software freedom for the general
public, and some projects — particularly those that are primarily in
service to companies rather than individual users (or who don’t want the
oversight a charity requires) — just don’t belong with us. We
regularly refer projects to Open Collective.

For many larger projects, Linux Foundation — as a 501(c)(6)
controlled completely by large technology companies — is also a great
option. We’ve often referred Conservancy applicants there, too. We do
that even
while we
criticize
Linux Foundation for choosing proprietary software for many tasks,
including proprietary software they write from scratch for their
outward-facing project services

Of course, I’m thinking about all this today because Conservancy has been
asked what we think
about the
Open Usage Commons. The fact is they’re just getting started and both
the legal details of how they’re handling trademarks, and their governance
documents, haven’t been released yet. We should all give them an
opportunity to slowly publish more and review it when it comes along. We
should judge them fairly as an alternative for fulfilling FOSS project
needs that no else addresses (or, more commonly are being addressed
very differently by existing organizations). I’m going to hypothesize
that, like Linux Foundation, Open Usage Commons will primarily be of
interest to more for-profit-company focused projects, but that’s my own
speculation; none of us know yet.

No one is denying that Open Usage Commons is tied to Google as part of
their founding — in the same way that Linux Foundation’s founding
(which was originally founded as the “Open Source Development
Labs”) was closely tied to IBM at the time. As near as I can tell,
IBM’s influence over Linux Foundation is these days no more than any other
of
their Platinum
Members. It’s not uncommon for a trade association to jumpstart with a
key corporate member and eventually grow to be governed by a wider group of
companies. But while appropriately run trade associations do balance the
needs of all for-profit companies in their industry, they are
decidedly
not neutral; they are chartered to favor business needs over
the needs of the general public. I encourage skepticism when you
hear an
organization claim “neutrality”. Since a trade association
is narrowed to serving businesses, it can be neutral among the interests of
business, but their mandate remains putting business needs above community.
The ultimate proof of neutrality pudding is in the eating. As with
multi-copyright held GPL’d projects, we can trust the equal rights for all
in those — regardless of the corporate form of the contributors
— because the document of legal rights makes it so. The same
principle applies to any area of FOSS endeavor: examine the agreements and
written rules for contributors and users to test neutrality.

Finally, there are plenty of issues where software freedom activists
should criticize Google. Just today, I was sent a Google Docs link for a
non-FOSS volunteer thing I’m doing, and I groaned knowing that I’d have to
install a bunch of proprietary Javascript just to be able to participate.
Often, software freedom activists assume that bad actions by an entity
means all actions are de-facto problematic. But we must judge each policy
move on its own merits to avoid pointless partisanship.