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.