[geoelectric]

Between Cygnus/Red Hat and Mozilla, I've worked for open-source-based companies for 7 years of my career, and never once heard or believed "open source" in lowercase to mean "OSI-approved."

I appreciate what OSI does, and do value an OSI review and endorsement, but you're seriously reaching here and trying to double-down on it.

Edit:

To be clear, I think the OSD captures what open source is, but OP tried to say "We haven't reviewed it, so it's not open source," not "We haven't reviewed it, so WE don't know it's still open source." Whether or not and when OSI gets around to reviewing something has zero bearing on whether something meets the OSD, even if we are going to assume that's the de facto definition.

I find the idea the VP thinks we need to wait on them to deliver their judgment from on high to be, frankly, offensive. OSI didn't successfully get the trademark on "open source" for a reason, and I can read a license myself.

[bad_user]

> Between Cygnus/Red Hat and Mozilla, I've worked for open-source-based companies for 7 years of my career, and never once heard or believed "open source" in lowercase to mean "OSI-approved."

That bullshit.

If that wasn't the case then Microsoft's Shared Source licenses could also be considered "open source", licenses which completely restricted commercial usage. Thankfully the world did not fall in that trap.

Without a working legal definition, the term "open source" becomes (1) meaningless and (2) a legal minefield.

Basically you've been spoiled by OSI approved licensing because our industry rejected anything else. We could've had a different industry and yes, all those bullshit projects on GitHub without a license are a legal minefield.