As a private person you're free to use words as you wish, but in this case this is false advertising by a company. Go on try to sell some pork dish as "vegan" or "kosher" food and I'll look how fast you'll be brought to a court. This is no different.

You are being blinded by your political agenda. This source code is readily available and costs nothing, thus it is both open and free. Much of the machinery here is relevant to me, so I can learn about the nature of the system through the code and adapt design lessons to completely unrelated applications. Without this free and open code no such thing would be possible.

I understand that you have nothing but loathing and contempt for my approach to software development and you are welcome to promote your philosophy but you will find it impossible to bend simple language to your wishes as long as there are people who see things completely differently.

Microsoft disagrees with you, and has since at least 2001, well before they cared about open source software at all. They use the terms "source-available" or "shared source". So do... all the other big enterprises. They don't want to confuse people; they want the restrictions on licensing to be clear.

What words would you like me to use for open source software that you're not going to trample over in 5 years when it becomes convenient for advertising your software?

> What words would you like me to use for open source software that you're not going to trample over in 5 years when it becomes convenient for advertising your software?

Option a) Makeup a non-generic not already in use term and trademark it.

Option b) Just say "licensed under <well_known_license>".

What you're required to do to get the exclusivity you're looking for is well established in the rules we are all required to play by known as "the law".

We're also required, when communicating with each other, to communicate in good faith and to create a shared understanding. There's no law about that, it's just pointless to try and communicate if we can't do that.

Otherwise, I can say something like this and expect you to understand me: Most people believe that an onlooker underhandedly ignores an omphalos, but they need to remember how non-chalantly the cigar about an espadrille laughs out loud. When a menagé à trois for a labyrinth rejoices, a starlet living with a clodhopper feels nagging remorse. An unsightly impresario is darling. When the surly menagé à trois starts reminiscing about lost glory, a curmudgeonly bubble ceases to exist.

Or I can redefine water to mean any clear liquid, including sulfuric acid, and sell that to you, and claim you should've understood what I meant when you die.

What you're trying to argue for is more akin to redefining "clear liquid" to mean water, and then trying to argue I'm deceiving you when I sell you a "clear liquid" and it happens to be sulfuric acid.

The words "open source" have a plain pre-existing meaning. "Water" does not.

Now to go ahead and make your argument for you - this use of the term open source might be like if I went ahead and sold you (having to force this a bit, since I've failed to find a good example of a noun) insurance against kicking the bucket, and then I tried to define it as insurance against literally kicking buckets. Possibly you can find a better example, but that's the best I could come up with and

- "the bucket" clearly distinguishes the term from being merely descriptive

- Selling insurance against kicking buckets makes no sense, unlike "open source software" where "open" means "anyone can look at it"

- Kicking the bucket is a phrase with a much longer history than OSI defined open source software.

"Grey" and "water" are both valid words that compose in English. And yet "grey water" is a specific thing. If you showed up and started shouting, "But it's water! And it's grey!" about some water that had been contaminated with fecal matter, then you'd rightfully be shut down.

This use of the words fit the plain meaning of the term open source, there's no chance in hell you're going to win a false advertising claim.

You can always try to brought any one for any reason to a court, doesn't mean you will succeed.

Nobody has a single authority on what words mean. That doesn't mean terms don't have established meanings, and it'll make things difficult for you if you insist on using them differently.

You're suggesting that language is meaningless - that communicating a shared understanding is not a goal of language.

I'm suggesting language is fluid, never static.

So I can just decide that "Donald Trump is a space alien" actually means that I'm gonna go buy a burger today, and this isn't going to mislead anyone at all? How about that "water" can now be used do describe any clear liquid, including sulfuric acid?

Go find your own words. "Shared source" has been used for literally decades to mean Defold's exact situation - why would you not use that?

>So I can just decide that "Donald Trump is a space alien" actually means that I'm gonna go buy a burger today, and this isn't going to mislead anyone at all

Yes you can, some people will hate it some people will like it, just like anything else

The moon is made of cheese. Flubber dub. Go drink some water.

Language is useless when it can't be used to create shared understanding.

Useless to you maybe, not everyone has the same purpose.

Ok so for the purpose of "shared understanding", let use my preferred definition of open source then.

I mean, if you're just talking for the sake of talking rather than communicating anything, go for it, but most reasonable people will ignore you.

Just like you I'm challenging your usage of the word.

> So I can just decide that "Donald Trump is a space alien" actually means that I'm gonna go buy a burger today

This is actually a rather good description of what the OSI did. They took a term with plain meaning that was already in use and tried to define it to mean something else.

Now people are getting mad when other people use the phrase "Donal Trump is a space alien" to literally mean that "Donald Trump is an alien from space".

(I can only assume that people have previously said that Donal Trump is a space alien... there are a lot of strange people in the world after all)

No, "open source" was not in common use at the time that OSI decided to use it. It's certainly not been used to mean anything except roughly OSI's definition until approximately two years ago, when Redis Labs decided to push the Commons Clause as being open source.

It was in use, both in software and in the world at large (especially the intelligence community). I suppose how it depends how you define "common" but "people use the term in official announcements and assume everyone knows what they mean" seems common enough to me.

- The OSI claims to have coined the term in 1998 https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...

- Here is a use of the term, 7 times, and as the main object, from 1996 http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html

- Here is a use of the term, as a proper noun, from 1993 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.ms-windows.pro...

OK, now find me regular usage of "open source", applied to software, by more than one person trying to sell something, as meaning something different from the OSI definition between approx 2000 and 2017.

Why? That's not relevant to your claim that

> "open source" was not in common use at the time that OSI decided to use it.

But I suspect that if you search reddit/hn discussions in that period thoroughly you'll find a few cases... feel free if you want to waste your time.

You haven't shown that "open source" was in common use at the time OSI decided to use it (1988 is earlier than 1996), nor that it's been in common use as meaning something else when applied to software since then. One company trying to sell something doesn't make it common use, either - otherwise I could claim that my water is from a "free source" and declare that for all eternity referring to free source must mean it comes from my specific river.

> (1988 is earlier than 1996)

Oops, that was a typo on my part, the OSI claims to have invented it in 1998 not 1988, updated my original post here too

See the source: https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...

Ah, thank you. Either way, one company using the term once before that doesn't mean that it is a phrase in common usage. It also doesn't mean that the term hasn't changed to mean something else in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of developers since them, and using it to mean its plain meaning will only ever cause confusion, and potentially result in people doing things you didn't want with the source code.

Epic, Microsoft, IBM, and hundreds of other companies, big and small, have been careful to avoid this issue specifically because there is an existing definition and it causes confusion.

> OSI […] took a term with plain meaning that was already in use and tried to define it to mean something else.

If this is what happened, then they succeeded.

Absolutely nobody is arguing in good faith that there exists a community of people using the term “open source software” to mean something specific to them, which is different from how the OSI defines the term. This community of people, if it ever existed, certainly does not exist anymore. It’s all corporate shills trying to argue in bad faith that they are allowed to call something “open source”. If it was really a confusing problem, they would call it something else; there are enough terms available. But it’s important to them to be able to fool people that it is OSI Open Source when in fact it isn’t, so they call it “open source”.

And then we have the literal-minded people who claim that word definitions are a question of dictionaries, historical precedent or etymology. These people are helping absolutely no-one, except the aforementioned corporations. Language is defined by current general use, and in current language, “open source software” means the OSI definition.

> If this is what happened, then they succeeded.

Probably so

> It’s all corporate shills trying to argue in bad faith that they are allowed to call something “open source”.

I've seen basically 0 evidence of this. As far as I've seen it's primarily people like me arguing that you can't lambast people for using words to mean what they mean (even if the specific combination of words has a now common second meaning), and people who naively use the term without understanding that there's a hoard of rabid programmers who insist that the phrase "open source" has been imbued with special meaning and using it otherwise is to summon the devil.

No corporate shill who has an understanding of the situation would be dumb enough to use the term and get into that fight.

> people who naively use the term without understanding

> No corporate shill who has an understanding of the situation would be dumb enough to use the term and get into that fight.

These are not people who made an innocent mistake. The product owner of Defold is commenting in this very thread (without any disclaimers, I might add). They want people to believe that it is really OSI “open source”, when in fact it isn’t.

I tend to believe that the product owner at Defold was genuinely unaware that there is this movement to redefine "open source" to mean something other than its plain meaning. After all, all "OSI open source" software is also "Plain Meaning open source", and it's the sort of pedantry that many people really don't give a fuck about.

It certainly didn't help them to use the term open source here, instead of everyone discussing the game engine they're releasing completely for free to the public with no strings attached and source code attached they're discussing the meaning of the term open source and accusing them of fraud.

It is not released to the public with no strings attached, that's the entire point here. There's very specific strings attached around some use of this work.

I was careful with my phrasing.

The engine was released for free with no strings attached - you're free to implement whatever you like using the engine.

The source code was released, with very minor strings attached.

Even ignoring the source then: you can't disassemble the compiled engine, modify it and use your modification commercially, afaict. That's a string.

Except they kinda do, seeing as OSI holds the literal trademark to open source.

Not only do they not hold a trademark, they tried to acquire a trademark and failed because it was "too descriptive" (and I suspect because it was already in use).

See my comment above for links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23234029