The battle-in-plain-sight over the meaning of "open" has claimed another casualty -- the Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group (OCCI-WG) at the Open Grid Forum (OGF). Things blew up on June 17, the eve of the forum's meeting in Chicago, at which the working group had hoped to showcase the cloud interface specification a team of volunteers had been working on for more than a year.  The chairs of the working group "fired" the group's secretary, Sam Johnston, after which Johnston publicly took one of the chairs -- Thijs Metsch -- to task.

The proximate cause of the dispute arose from Johnston's insistence that the specification be given a Creative Commons license rather than the "restrictive" (says Johnston) OGF license favored by everyone else  (says Andre Merzky, who came to Metsch's defense). Apparently, Johnston then threatened to revoke the copyright on his work that he had granted the group and have the work licensed on his own. (He referred to his portion of the work as "essentially all of the normative specification," and Merzky says the logs show Johnston contributed 2/3rds of the work.)

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