> "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "who is to be master - that's all."
- Through the Looking-Glass, slightly adjusted.
The whole goal of calling it "open source" is to take advantage of the positive connotations associated with the term. But the positive connotations come from software published under the dogma, and are inseparable from it.
(You can see the same twists and turns in Elastic's FAQ, where they desperately try to twist language so that "open" and "source" are as close together as possible without outright making contact. Guess nobody told them they can just use the word under their own definition, or as the rest of the world calls it, "lie".)
Either way, this is one of those age old debates about descriptive vs prescriptive language that will have absolutely no impact whatsoever. People will continue to post things they call open source that you disagree are open source, and you will continue to moan about it.
Language evolves.
The orthodox view on open source is a useful and broadly understood shorthand for a certain enumeration of rights, the withholding of those rights disproportionately serves a certain group of interests at the expense of others, and disregarding these problems and using the terminology incorrectly in spite of them is willfully dishonest.
Just because pepsi tastes like coca cola, doesn't make it coca cola.
Open source/free software places no restrictions on use/modification/distribution, end of story. With the sole exception of copyleft, which disallows you to distribute & withhold source, i.e. stopping you from depriving others of the very freedom that you benefitted from.
This places restrictions on use. Ergo it is not open source. Attempting to muddy the waters by using hand-wavey "you get most of your freedom!" type talk just muddies the waters and is precisely why the term got trademarked and why a definition exists. And it really is not hard to understand.
If people use it in this context, it means this thing. And they do, so it does.
to them, it means that thing to them
The only reason a project would even use the label Open Source is to reap the benefits that they get when people associate it with an ideology. Using such a term for virtue points, then turning around and saying "well, you know what, I have my own definition of Open Source" is just blatant grifting.
Your whole argument boils down to "we can and we will hijack the words for our own benefit", but if you succeed, you'll make Open Source less trustworthy in the public opinion, therefore shooting yourself in the foot.
Cool your own use of language, I don’t think it’s at all appropriate or within HN guidelines.
People are using the word differently, and the community is telling them to stop using the words differently because it's misleading. What exactly are you arguing, that community should not do that? That, you know, the open source community should not tell people to stop using the term "open source" incorrectly?
I'll cool my own language when you stop presenting your reductionist Philosophy 101 "it's just words bro" arguments without doing any further analysis. It's just words bro so why do you care that I said I had sex with your mother last night? Maybe I meant it as a compliment!
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
People are using the word differently, and the community is telling them to stop using the words differently because it's misleading. What exactly are you arguing, that community should not do that? That, you know, the open source community should not tell people to stop using the term "open source" incorrectly?
But, no, I’ve quite clearly stated you can argue they shouldn’t use that definition. But you cannot credibly say that their usage is wrong if they are successfully communicating with others using that definition.
The word will change usage, or it won’t, and neither of us will probably have any say over it.
You can use your words in whatever way you want with whatever people you want, but can't deliberately ignore the widely-adopted definitions because "language changes" and claim everyone else is wrong and your microcosmos is right. Wake me up when language actually changes (i.e. when the majority adopts the new definition) and then we'll talk.
There’s literal dictionaries that disagree with you, so plenty of credibility to the alternative meanings.
I certainly do not recognise any charity’s right to define a word, so it is not official to me - or, apparently, to the OED or Wikipedia, and I would bet most other dictionaries and people.
Most people in the open source community recognize OSI definition as authoritative. "Muh assumption" - if you want data, look at the comment section in this article, most people disagree with you. You may have your microcosms of people who don't know/don't care about history of open source/free software, but your ignorance doesn't grant you any authority over language, either.
Use the language any way you want, but stop throwing tantrums when people rightfully tell you that you're using it wrong.
To use your example, it might be that murder evolved from meaning “a crime has been committed” to meaning a specific crime. Which, um, is exactly what happened.
The definition of open source is the same. It's not a random thing, it has specific elements which make up the definition. You may not like or agree with those elements, but then it's probably better that you go off and a) define something else for your purposes b) ignore the definition and be subject to legal redress if you contravene the definition.
One useful place to start with the definition (and there are, of course, many specific types of licenses, some of which are more restrictive than others) is https://opensource.org/osd
Secondly, good luck convincing everyone they “need to think about how they use words”
Thirdly, “legal redress”!?
>> 'legal redress'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation
Words are fuzzy, most people don’t look at dictionaries, let alone OSI or FSF definitions. A word changing usage often just indicates the meaning was never as precise as you thought, the distinction just hadn’t yet mattered.
Your argument is roughly equivalent to this one: "I can call this random cereal Cheerios, because language evolves and neither you nor General Mills decides how people use language."
[0] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/google_retains_its_t...
I then mentioned loss of trademark protection to further evidence that such words change meaning.
“Cheerios” is a made-up product name, and without knowing the definition of it, one couldn’t tell what it means. (I had to look it up, in fact.) In contrast, “open” and “source” are generic words, and in combination they can be used and understood without knowing any of the FOSS history.
That’s actually how I was introduced to the term: I always understood “open source” to just literally mean “the source code is openly accessible” – no more, no less. Even after having learned about the FOSS aspect later on, I continued to interpret “open source” in that literal sense.
Since this debate is a bit … heated, let me add that I’m not interested in making any general claims with my statement – I’m rather sharing my own perception to contribute a data point to how language can be used and understood differently, depending on where people come from.
“Open source” can be legitimately used as generic term, and as such one doesn’t need any definition at all to use the term in its colloquial sense.
Imagine someone were to arbitrarily define the term “free lunch” to mean something very specific, instead of the naive interpretation of “a meal at noon that you don’t have to pay for”. Only because they’d claim and publish their definition doesn’t make it universal from then on, regardless of whether the combination of those words had been used somewhere else before.
If you think of patent law, for example, it’s not for nothing that you can’t claim a trademark on generic terms. The reasoning behind that stems from the very same problem.
I agree with you that it probably would have been better if the FOSS movement had established a more specific term for what they meant. (Like: “FOSS”, for example.) But – to put it bluntly – that’s a home-made problem on behalf of the FOSS movement, and not mine.
Nobody used the term "open source" before it was deliberately invented. There was plenty of software in the 80s and 90s that we could retroactively call "open source," but nobody used that phrase at the time. The phrase "open source" was specifically created in 1998 because the term then in common use, "free software," was too generic and people were confused about what it meant. So a new term was created for the express purpose to have a term with no prior meaning so that a specific meaning could be assigned to it.
You seem to think that because "open source" is a phrase you see a lot, it's a generic phrase that was always used informally and grew out of natural language. But that's not the case. It's a term of art that was artificially created with a specific meaning.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. That means being more careful to "edit out swipes", as the guidelines put it.
I work on an open source project that meets your definition of open source, and I think I would refer to this project as open source. If you want to exclude licenses with any restrictions to use from your terminology you should come up with a clearer phrase, such as “unrestricted source”
Source available is more inaccurate, as a significant proportion of users will be able to use this software exactly as they would any other open source project, so for them the terms are functionally equivalent.
So, you’re of course welcome to advocate against using the term, but this weird attitude that it’s actually “wrong” is just nonsense. Neither you nor the OSI decide how people use language.