Yesterday’s launch of Open Source Media could have gone by with little comment from me except to congratulate a group of well known bloggers on attempting something like Philly Future, except far grander in scope and size (which helps when you have millions of dollars of financing and big names pushing it). Instead what I see is troubling and hopefully will change.

OSM.org mission, in its words is to: is to expand the influence of weblogs by finding and promoting the best of them, providing bloggers with a forum to meet and share resources, and the chance to join a for-profit network that will give them additional leverage to pursue knowledge wherever they may find it.

An admirable mission. One much like Philly Future’s. I don’t look at commercialization as a negative thing. We are even part of an ad network for local Philadelphia advertisers. Among blogs in my personal aggregator are those from Weblogs Inc, Gawker Media, Metroblogging and Gothamist, and in two cases, Philly Future’s. But there’s much wrong with the implementation of this particular network so far.

While some have attacked the authors and concept behind OSM – that is not my concern. In fact, I applaud their effort.

I have a more serious set of concerns. Among them the the highjacking of an ethos that the site is the antithesis of. Read my thoughts on OSM at Philly Future.

I hope Tim O’Reilly, ESR, and other supporters of the concepts behind open source will set these folks straight. Lawrence Lessig should take a look as well.

It’s depressing to see “open source” reduced to so much marketing blather, in such a hypocritical way, by people who should know better.

Kinda like war == peace, now open == closed.