The power to sue isn't the only form of authority worth considering. Many projects and groups consider OSI authoritative in what constitutes open source, including Debian, Ubuntu, Mozilla, the Apache foundation, the Creative Commons non-profit, RedHat, Google (at least when they hosted Google Code), and others. Personally, I'm glad that the OSI occupies this role, otherwise, the term "open source" would inevitably be diluted to mean gratis or even worse.
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The power to sue isn't the only form of authority worth considering. Many projects and groups consider OSI authoritative in what constitutes open source, including Debian, Ubuntu, Mozilla, the Apache foundation, the Creative Commons non-profit, RedHat, Google (at least when they hosted Google Code), and others. Personally, I'm glad that the OSI occupies this role, otherwise, the term "open source" would inevitably be diluted to mean gratis or even worse.