pretty sure I crossed words with Bruce Perens in 1998 about how "shared source" would be a better term. He was in full on advocate mode then, telling everyone that they should not only use his term, but also that they should assign copyrights to their work to his foundation so that their work could be properly cared for. He did not impress people with that argument that I saw.

This is the part of the official OSI history (a newer text than the one linked in TFA) that I think is most relevant to the modern controversies [0]:

> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape.

As is the way of so many things, what started out as an attempt to be pragmatic and to ditch dogma has become a dogma of its own. It's somewhat painful to me to see the "OSI definition" of Open Source held up as a canonical gospel when the organization was explicitly founded to do away with the moralizing of the Free Software movement.

If we're going to have a moral movement, let's make it the one that was designed to champion user freedoms, not the one that was created to be friendly to corporations. And on the flip side, if we're going to have a movement that is friendly to corporations, why not let it adapt to changing situations to continue to be friendly?

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

I think it's too late to try to pin down the term "open source" to any one particular meaning. Instead I think we can evolve to something like what Creative Commons has done, and use various terms to describe various "sub-philosophies" for things like copyleft, CLA free/required, non-compete clauses, etc. Although this will be hard to orchestrate since there's no trademark on "open source" (unlike on "creative commons" for example). I will dig into this more in future posts (I'm the author of the post)

Btw, what does TFA mean? (I'm new to hackernews)

thanks!

The whole point of "open source" was/is to crush the idea of expanding user freedom. period.

Removing the distracting idea that s/w could be for the benefit of it's users, as opposed to the financial brnefit of the ownership of s/w development.

This is why you'll never see the words "free software" in the vulture capital oriented HN...