Four facets of OSS are 1) Licensing (Foundations or Trade Associations play no role here) 2) Governance - There are many ways to implement governance. The vendors keep open or restrictive governance or they offload it to an OSS Foundation like Apache Foundation or

a trade association like Linux Foundation or just don't have any governance (anarchy). But an OSS license trumps governance any day because of the opportunity to fork 3) Trademarks - The vendors keep it or offload it to OSS Foundations/Trade Associations. When vendors keep it,

they could stop you from using the trademark for your marketing purposes and you have no control over it. OSS Foundations/Trade Associations regulate the use of trademarks and level the playing field. Some expect a tax and others expect only compliance and

4) Marketing - Vendors can do it and OSS Foundation/Trade Associations can do it too. This is where the difference between OSS Foundations and Trade Associations come. OSS Foundations don't focus much on marketing and they focus on community building whereas

OSS Trade Associations prioritize marketing as it is critical for the very existence of the OSS trade associations.

With this clarification out of the way, few points:

1) Open Source definition has no relevance to governance, Foundations, or marketing. Only License matters

2) Governance has no relevance to marketing. Vendors, Trade Associations, and Open Source Foundations like Apache Foundation can handle this effectively (or ineffectively) but there are certain risks involved with each of these groups. Understand the risks and embrace the model

3) OSS Trade Associations claiming that the only legitimate way to handle governance is through them is plain ridiculous. Vendors can just pay their tax & leverage the OSS projects. Similarly, OSS Foundations like Apache Foundation has bureaucracy laden problems in the community

4) My personal preference is that marketing should be left to the individual vendors. Trade association can do the minimal marketing that is needed for the project and then STFU on the rest. We saw what happened in the OpenStack community. Hypermarketing by them is a problem

Open Source has seen many major divorces. Whether it is MySQL or Joomla, we have seen those fights through the history of OSS. Now we are seeing a split between vendors who don't like the "drawbacks" of trade association vs those who see their convenience. It is ok too

Whatever be the debates, let us be clear about the four facets of OSS highlighted here and not conflate one over the other. I know today's social media culture has no place for nuances but we can still strive to keep the nuances in any debate. Let's not go extreme