Open source has an accepted and well understood meaning to developers; when people use the term to mean something other than that, it is 100% of the time for exploitative purposes, and they know they are being disingenuous.

I've used the term for 25+ years to describe my own source-included free software projects, and I'll thank you (and OSI) for not policing my language. No trademark? No standing. Choose other crusades.

Overreaction much? Nobody is policing. Your failure to recognize the meaning of a word - like any other - is just going to harm you due to your own ignorance of its ramifications.

(Shrug) As you will note at the top of the thread, williamstein is policing. All I'm doing is pointing out that the policeman has no badge, no gun, and no uniform, and that their cruiser looks suspiciously like a '92 Crown Victoria with black and white spray paint and a spotlight from Cabela's.

I think they literally coined and defined the term over 25 years ago.

That's not how it works. They're entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own dictionary.

When you combine two words into a fundamentally novel phrase, you are not expressing an opinion, you are contributing to the global (or in this case, anglophone) dictionary.

So if you were to write that you are not in the habit of stealing from children, you might have a private idiosyncratic definition of "steal" or "child"?

Well, I certainly can't argue with that, um... logic.

Meanwhile, if anyone is entitled to the distinction of having "coined" the "fundamentally novel" phrase, it's a guy named Robert Steele who publicized the term "open source intelligence" in 1990 and organized the First International Symposium on Open Source Solutions in 1992.

The phrase was first applied to software by the drafters of the Open Source Definition.

Be that as it may, it's a generic phrase, as evinced by its prior usage in other fields like intelligence and journalism. Lacking a trademark, OSI has zero authority to word-police everyone else. No amount of plugging their ears and chanting lalalala will change the fact that OSI does not own exclusive rights to the phrase "open source." Not with respect to software, not with respect to anything else.

The author of the project in this article is perfectly within their rights to use the term, and the rest of us know very well what they mean by it.

"Steal" and "child" likewise lack any trademark protection.

So, suppose I accuse you of stealing from children, then when you protest, I reply that the meaning I give those 2 words might not be the meaning most people have, but that is fine because no one owns the exclusive rights to those 2 words.