Call for Equitable Open Source

While more and more companies are adopting free and open source software -whether as a keyword, a commodity or a business strategy- their influence on open source projects has been steadily growing.

This is not bad as such since this resulted in many more companies contributing to the FOSS ecosystem. However this also resulted in a situation where the balance of power has somewhat shifted from community-centric to commercial-induced  interests.

And since commercial interests don't always correspond (why would they?) to the spirit and the principles of free and open source software, there is a  need to balance more equitably commercial and community interests through new initiatives.

The Equitable Open Source (EOS) is one such initiative, aiming at defining a label attached to companies producing software applications. Since many -including industry analysts- predict that in just a few years most commercially-produced software will encompass substantial pieces (hopefully entire projects) of free and open source software, it makes sense to focus first on large companies which business is to produce software and which influence is the greatest. This of course, doesn't preclude rewarding smaller companies for the quality and/or the novelty of their interaction with the free and open source software community.

Now such initiative cannot work without the active participation of FOSS developers or it will just turn into another marketing buzz that sooner or later will be exploited by somebody: Nature dislikes vacuum.

We need to start somewhere so I you want to participate in jump starting things, hopefully before OSCON, drop me an email mtg@milkingthegnu.org and we will start from there.

Also appreciated would be somebody willing to host a wiki and a mailing list. On a minor tone, if somebody who really knows about logo design could step in, the result would probably be better than what I've done above :-)