Will The Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up?
Dana Blankenhorn's story How far can open source CRM get? has finally pushed me to respond to the many people who have asked "When is the OSI going to stand up to companies who are flagrantly abusing the term 'open source'?" The answer is: starting today.
Context & Ripple Effects
The announcement lands after months of definitional friction in the coverage: March's What is Open Source? Q&A laid out the licensing criteria, and May's skeptical takedown of open source sharpened the criticism that the label was being stretched past meaning. Dana Blankenhorn's question about how far open source CRM can get was the trigger the Open Source Initiative used to answer a question it says it has been asked repeatedly: when would it confront companies flagrantly abusing the term.
First-order effects
- Vendors marketing products as 'open source' without meeting OSI-approved licensing now face an active critic with a defined standard, rather than a standards body that had stayed silent.
- CRM becomes the first named battleground: any vendor in that category claiming the label will be measured against the definition the OSI has spent 2007 articulating.
Second-order effects
- Buyers evaluating open-source-labeled software gain a third-party arbiter, shifting diligence from vendor self-certification to checking against the published definition — and vendors that fail the check face repositioning costs or relabeling.
- Competitors who do comply can weaponize the distinction in sales cycles, turning certification against rivals whose 'open source' claims are loose.
Third-order effects
- If the OSI sustains enforcement, the term 'open source' hardens from a marketing adjective into a defensible standard, raising the cost of label abuse across every software category, not just CRM.
- The episode foreshadows the recurring tension between community definitions and commercial reuse of the label that later resurfaces whenever open source meets large-scale monetization.
The trend: Open source governance is moving from passive definition-setting toward active policing of the term as commercial vendors adopt it.