[Klathmon]

Like all good arguments, this one comes down to semantics!

I'm not going to argue about what a word or phrase "should" mean, but I am going to say that I think the FOSS community could benefit from being more open to different views in this area.

I think this is a case of dogmatism (that might not be the right word here, in this case i mean overly adhering to definitions) that is causing the entire community to be worse off.

Similar to how you said many people see the unwillingness to adopt a new term as "infringing on the ideals" of the original, I am seeing an attempt to be more honest and straightforward about the intent and ability to use a product.

GPL and friends "blackmail" companies into wanting to choose the proprietary license. It may not mean to do that, and there is normally no ill intentions, but it does in my experience.

Contrasted to Apache 2 + Common Clause, it's upfront about what you can and can't do. You can use this under the apache 2, unless you want to sell it, and then you can't. There's no need to dance around the fact, or try to play games where you don't "technically" restrict the right to sell, but in practice you do, or you introduce technical complexity to avoid triggering rather arbitrary parts of a license. The "official definition" is causing users to be in a worse position in some cases.

We can argue over semantics until the end of time, but at the end of the day "fair licensing" means nothing to me, but "open source" or "open source with restrictions" does. If the concept of the term "open source" changes, I feel nobody will be really impacted for the worse. Debian won't start suddenly allowing less-free software in their core, they will just continue to use the definition they do now and the list of licenses which are acceptable that they do now. But what will happen is we will see more experimentation with monetization methods that don't rely on loopholes or technicalities in existing licenses to achieve the same thing in practice.

[icebraining]

If the concept of the term "open source" changes, I feel nobody will be really impacted for the worse.

Of course it does. It dilutes the concept, making it less relevant and useful. Currently I know that I can sell something I make using open source libraries; tomorrow, I won't. At each dilution, the concept is rendered less useful and more irrelevant.

But what will happen is we will see more experimentation with monetization methods that don't rely on loopholes or technicalities in existing licenses to achieve the same thing in practice.

More experimentation is great, but that doesn't justify reusing the terminology to mean other things.

It's not even a good PR move, considering the (completely predictable) pushback. It's just silly.

[Klathmon]

>It dilutes the concept, making it less relevant and useful. Currently I know that I can sell something I make using open source libraries; tomorrow, I won't.

I'm not trying to twist your words, but that point has already been crossed in my opinion. You can sell some code, but it comes with a lot of extra work that you'll have to do in many cases (if it's copyleft), and all licenses have additional restrictions or aspects that must be followed.

Just because you can categorize many of those licenses into some umbrellas doesn't mean you can wholesale ignore the details of each since it's under some category of "open source".

"Open Source" already means many different things. Copyleft, permissive, are patents or trademarks included? Can you give a warranty? What form of distribution counts? How do you need to make the source available? All of these things vary wildly among OSI licenses, and in the end it's not causing any massive issues because the overarching term isn't used as a technical term, it's used as a colloquialism.