Honest question; what does OSI actually do? I am involved with a number of OS projects and not once has OSI come up in any context, be it compliance, governance, education and so on.
Previously, if your project used one of the main OS licences you were good as far as they were concerned. They mainly existed to avoid lawyers coming up with licenses that water down the rights an open source license provides.
So every time I talk about open source I'm a dirty trademark infringer and IP pirate?
The fact that they have fooled so many people into thinking they own a trademark on a generic phrase is, however, pretty impressive.
In the US you can trademark and patent H2O if you insist a bit, so it wouldn't surprise me if they actually owned the actual trademark.
own the trademark of “Open Source”.
They tried, and the USPTO denied their application for same. As such they have any such right to exercise.
They own a trademark for “Open Source Initiative”, and attempt to persuade the public that they alone define the term “Open Source”.
Nevertheless, their Open Source Definition is reasonably respected
> the use of the term “Open Source” is used solely in reference to software distributed under OSI Approved Licenses. [1]
So you can refer to any software as "Open Source," regardless of their definition. But, if you call a piece of software "Open Source" alongside the use of the Open Source Initiative's trademark, then you must also use their definition of "Open Source," unless you otherwise have written permission.
In more concrete terms: they're the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD), which is a rather explicit, but still subject to interpretation, list of criteria to decide if a particular software license is, or is not, "really Open Source". This is very important in the context of "Open Source washing" that is still a thing, and was even more important a decade or two ago, when there was a Cambrian explosion of licenses which claimed to be Open Source.
The OSI is specifically built with a different vision from the FSF.
Free software, shall always be free, with almsource and ideally all derived works.
Open Source wants the code to be spread and for that allows inclusion with commercial software. (i.e. Microsoft was able to take open source TCP/IP stacks from BSD (BSD License) and integrate with Windows 95. That wouldn't have worked with a GPL Free Software implementation. (Even LGPL)
The supporting argument there is: By allowing that Microsoft's implementation was fully compatible to the rest of the world instead of having "bugs" (purposely?) in their own implementation, which would limit interoperability.
The free software argument is that they now took the code and closed it, not giving users a freedom to review (verify) and fix themselves. Which allowed Windows to play in TCP world instead of being an outsider.
You're thinking of copyleft licenses, not Free Software.
FSF puts it this way:
> Another group uses the term “open source” to mean something close (but not identical) to “free software.” We prefer the term “free software” because, once you have heard that it refers to freedom rather than price, it calls to mind freedom. The word “open” never refers to freedom.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
The OSI has its definition here: https://opensource.org/osd
And yes, the term "open source" predates OSI, but till OSI didn't have any specific definition and was slightly different for everybody. OSI created a mostly accepted definition whoch is distinct from FSF's Free Software definition.
The movements have differing philosophical and political stances, but Free Software is automatically also Open Source Software, and vice versa.
If they do anything more than that, then I've not seen it.