The Open Semantic Interchange project, an effort to define a vendor-neutral format for expressing business metrics and their dimensions so semantic layer definitions can move between different data platforms without being rewritten from scratch, was accepted into the Apache Incubator under the name Apache Ossie, with contributors from Snowflake, Salesforce, Databricks, and dbt Labs among its backers. The problem this targets is a familiar one to any data team that's tried to maintain consistent metric definitions, what exactly counts as "monthly active users" or "net revenue," across multiple BI tools, semantic layers, and data platforms: without a shared standard, each platform typically has its own proprietary way of expressing these definitions, meaning metric logic has to be duplicated and kept in sync by hand across every tool that needs it, and definitions inevitably drift apart over time as one team updates a metric in one system without propagating the change everywhere else. A vendor-neutral, Apache-governed standard for expressing these semantic layer definitions, with major competing vendors, Snowflake, Salesforce, and Databricks are direct competitors in parts of the data platform market, jointly contributing to it, is a meaningful signal that the industry has concluded metric-definition lock-in serves nobody's long-term interest, even the vendors', since customers stuck rewriting semantic layers every time they touch a new tool are customers with a real reason to resist adopting new tools at all. For data platform and analytics engineering teams, Apache Ossie is worth tracking as a potential long-term answer to the "define your metrics once, use them everywhere" problem that most organizations currently solve with brittle, tool-specific workarounds or accept as an ongoing maintenance burden.