"Don't' get me wrong; I like what OSI represents," Roberts began. "How are they elected, though? If you're going to be supreme court of what open source is, how did you get to become elected? That's the question that we have to ask."

Roberts has been at the opposing end of the OSI spectrum with his SugarCRM application, which has used a non-OSI-approved license while still calling the application open source. SugarCRM currently uses the Sugar Public license, which is the Mozilla Public License with an attribution clause.

For its next release, SugarCRM has stated that it will be moving to the GPLv3.

The GPLv3 is expected to be an officially approved OSI license soon. Danese Cooper, who holds the official title of Open Source Diva at Intel, is also on the board of the OSI and was quick to debate with Roberts.

Cooper never looked at Roberts directly during their confrontation; rather she sat in her panel chair. Knitting. Cooper argued that OSI participation is self selecting and that anyone can join the mailing list. She never directly answered Robert's questions about how the board is chosen or for how long their terms exist.

From a legal point of view, whether a license is OSI approved may not matter all that much, either, according to panelist Virginia Tsai Badenhope, an associate with legal firm Smithline Jha LLP.

"Whether an application has an OSI-approved license or not does not impact our analysis," Badenhope said. "The goals of the OSI are different than a typical legal department."

Badenhope added that OSI approval does make it somewhat easier for developers, though, as it tells them what rights they have.

It is license clarity and the OSI approval that may well be the most important aspect from an end user perspective.

"We're looking for lack of ambiguity in what we're licensing," panelist Oliver Marks, senior manager of Web portal for Sony PlayStation, said.

While the title of the panel was "Why Open Source Licensing Matters," panel moderator Matt Asay, vice president of business development at Alfresco, said it does matter, though maybe not for all the people on this panel. Asay recently helped to move Alfresco from a SugarCRM-type attribution license to the GPLv2.

Though the panel didn't agree on the value of OSI-approved open source licensing, it did agree on the value of the open source model.

"Open source as a community matters," Asay said.

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