When the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) was originally announced I had some significant concerns about their membership structure. Most of these concerns focussed on whether lots of things were to be done behind closed doors.
Today, I visited the OSA site to see if anything visible was happening. I got a very pleasant surprise.
The site has had a major overhaul and is now more than just a marketing channel for the commercial partners in the OSA. It has lots of community areas that anyone, member or not, can access. This is a good sign.
There are indications that the abilities of a non-member will be restricted , for example, I am marked as an “observer” after having gone through the simple registration process, but that’s fair enough. I don’t expect to be able to influence the OSA significantly unless I contribute significantly, my concerns were mainly about the potential for important decisions affecting third party open source projects being made in a private members club, it appears that this will not be the case.
The OSA management is private, but it seems everyone will be welcome to attend and will have a voice. Thus many (although not all) of my concerns are laid to rest.
It’s still very early days for the OSA, there’s very little actually happening there at present, but the early signs are encouraging. I’ll be visiting the site more often from now on.
Hi Ross,
Thanks for the kind words. I’m shepherding the OSA interoperability working group right now, and I am dedicated to keeping the process compeletely open. There is a proposal on the forums right now about how we make decisions, and I borrowed pretty heavily from the Apache Foundation. Its also pretty explicit about what rights non-OSA members have in the interoperability decision making. In a nutshell, anybody and everybody can participate in the discussions of interoperability practice, and folks who consistently add value to the discussions can become “contributers” with full voting rights. You do need a company membership to become a contributer. What a corporate membership gets you is a voice in the OSA governance.
-Barry Klawans