THE Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has had several heads shuffled over the past couple of years. The latest leadership is Anthony Gold, who was the vice president and general manager of open source business at Unisys. He's embarking some sort of a 'press tour' at the moment. As Glyn Moody rightly points out, the old policy of "keep Microsoft out" is no more and this alliance becomes more similar to the Novell/Microsoft arrangement.

To my mind, that's really a betrayal of the OSA's original purpose. Improving interoperability with proprietary codebases does nothing to promote free software – on the contrary. It means that free software plays by the rules of the closed source world – think of how Microsoft has embraced, extended and extinguished the definition of “open” in order to dilute and pervert the true meaning of open standards (OOXML, anyone?) and open source.

In addition, interoperability with proprietary systems often implies explicitly entering into licensing agreements or implicitly accepting software patents. Both weaken the very basis of free software.

Instead, open source companies should be standing fully behind truly open standards, and pushing for their wider adoption in the enterprise world. Actively supporting proprietary standards simply bolsters them, and makes displacing with fairer alternatives even harder.

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I don't know how the individual company members of the OSA feel about this dramatic policy shift, but I predict that the OSA will dwindle into insignificance unless it returns to its roots as an “Solutions Alliance” based on true openness, and not simply a “Solutions Alliance” that is open to all-comers, including proprietary vendors pushing patent-encumbered closed source solutions to the detriment of free software.

Bridges to abyss