It's mentioned half-way down the blogpost (https://hackernoon.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-an-open-start...)

>There’s no official definition yet, and the Oxford dictionary weren’t available for comment, so let’s write one; A product or company which operates in the open and shares their statistics publicly.

While some of us intuitively get it, a clearer word here might be “transparent”.

The business stats (income generated, views, etc) are available publicly, the business practices and choices might be available, the customer data is of course not available, and the service is not required to be free.

Think of these as very valuable learning tools for how to run your own business (and IMHO a pretty great marketing tool for them).

From the subheading of the site.

> All these startups and side projects are building out in the open. Check them out!

I think this definition is a little lose though. I went to try and see the Muzeek source code and the only thing I found was open source SDKs. I wouldn’t call that building in the open

Apparently it has nothing to do with open source, bur open business practices and metrics.

A bit of a hijack of the word "open" but I'll be generous and say "naming is hard".

If I have to pay money to use something, it's not open. It's a total cooption

What happened to "free as in speech, not free as in beer"?

I don't have to pay to speak either

That's true, but not what they mean by that saying. It's distinguishing between the two common usages of "free" to clarify that free and open-source software isn't about price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#%22Free_be...