> That is not what "Open Source" means.

"Open Source" means different things to different people and not everyone accepts the OSI definition, there are even people who are angry at ESR for grabbing the phrase for himself and making his definition the most popular one.

esr didn't coin the term, Christine Peterson did, and Tim O'Reilly funded the OSI compaign. Also, nobody used the term before OSI did, except with an unrelated meaning in the intelligence community.

http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...

>"Open Source" means different things to different people

And those people are wrong. The OSI definition is the definition. Those that want it to mean something else are trying to fool people, which we call "open washing."

Pedantically you're probably correct. However the OSI term is basically what people mean when they say "Open Source" now.

Much like many countries have a mile, if you started using Roman miles in England or the USA people would think you misleading

Yeah, it seems like he doesn't understand the basics of the law in this area which makes the Somalia analogy pretty ignorant.

To expand on what you said: the term open source has a specific meaning and it doesn't mean "the source is available". From Wikipedia:

> "Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose."

Once upon a time most of the JDK had the source available - with all rights reserved. It was emphatically not OSS.

Even though that is the predominant interpretation of "open source" in the tech community, I think one could argue that the term "open source" has no legal meaning (outside of a license agreement, that is). So for the purposes of this argument (code w/o a license), the term is meaningless.