[tlrobinson]

I don't think simply checking that the license is "OSI approved" gives you many legal guarantees. There are currently 83 "OSI approved" licenses containing a variety of terms, from aggressively copyleft to extremely permissive: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical

[bunderbunder]

I don't either. . . we might be playing a game of moving goalposts here. I was specifically responding to the observation that, "Open source for most people means whether you can see and modify the source code.", and saying that that, while that is a workable definition, it's probably not one that most people want to use.

[jfoutz]

You might want to be a little tighter with that definition. You can find the source for all sorts of crazy stuff. And with that, you can modify it.

Oracle or Microsoft or any other copyright holder that didn’t release that is going to be ticked off at you.

There has to be some element of the author wants you to have it.

I know this sounds silly and pedantic. I think there have been organizations that ignored copyright and released stuff they didn’t control the rights to.

You might want to tack on something about the authors want me to have access to this.

[Freso]

… And I think this has exactly been @bunderbunder's argument from the start? That the "definition" put forth by threeseed is naïve and could at best be usable on an amateur level, but as soon as you start having money involved, you really want a more in-depth/verbose/specific definition (like the one the OSI provides), rather than simply being "I can read (and thus modify) the source."

[bunderbunder]

Not even just money.

Part of why I originally used the term "non-amateur" instead of "professional" when I described people who shouldn't work under that definition is that, while students and maintainers of open source projects might not be getting paid for what they're doing, they still have compelling reasons to be more careful about licensing.

One worst-case scenario for a student might be that some software licensing snafu threatens their academic work, and, by extension, their whole career. And open source project maintainers have an ethical responsibility not to get users of their work into legal hot water.

For those people, falling in line with OSI offers a huge advantage: You can't avoid crossing the software licensing legal tightrope. But, by sticking to working with OSI-approved licenses, you can at least ensure that you're working with a net.