Certified Open - a potential certification process for Europe?

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 22:08 +0100, Shane M. Coughlan wrote:
> Some business connected to FOSS in Ireland are seriously considering a
> certification framework called Certified Open.  The interest in this
> matter is mainly centred around the Open Ireland group, though this is
> not exclusively their domain.  As you may have gathered from this
> paragraph this is very much an 'open source' thing.

It's not an "open source" thing - it's about preventing lock in. You can
still achieve Certified Open status if your product is not licensed on a
free software / open source basis.

>From the marketing brochure:

        "Certified Open supports an organisation to develop all aspects
        of an open environment.
        
        "Both by encouraging a mix and match of proprietary and Open
        Source Software, and by ensuring both internal and supplier
        staff have the level of skills necessary."
        
You'll find that OFE have started talking about "Open Solutions" rather
than open source, which is moving in entirely the wrong direction.

I wish you luck trying to change it, but I'm afraid I already consider
it a lost cause as it is already damaging our community in the UK. In
particular, while you're addressing problems with the framework, you're
not addressing the more fundamental problem of the fit of this type of
certification with free software. Even though this is self-certified,
you have to pay to register both products and skills. That automatically
means any free software project that is not commercially supported is
unlikely to be able to participate in this scheme, which I consider to
be bias.

Cheers,

Alex.