[ocdtrekkie]

It's insane to me that people can argue the OSI owns the phrase "open source" or that the FSF owns the phrase "free software".

In the current scenario, where the OSI has flatly failed to act to do anything necessary to protect open source as a workable concept, at what point can we decide that they aren't adequate stewards of the term?

[cycloptic]

This question comes up fairly often on HN and I'll paraphrase what I've said before. I could see some other group becoming an adequate steward of the term when the larger open source community agrees with their changes, and they do a re-review of all the existing OSI licenses to ensure they meet the new definition and are compatible with whatever the new incoming licenses are. This will probably involve lots of community outreach and paying lawyers to do it over some years. I'm not sure what else you would expect to happen -- forking the entire community over a legal nit pick is going to be just as expensive as forking a software project.

When you say it's not a workable concept, without context it's very hard for me to interpret this in any way besides the usual "open source doesn't let us make profits off of keeping the source code restricted and/or secret" or "open source doesn't let me deny access to my competitors or personal enemies" which are kind of the entire point. Please fill me in if I'm not doing a charitable interpretation.

[ocdtrekkie]

I am not particularly invested in a given approach, but the fact that open source is easily lifted by non-open corporate entities seems particularly problematic to open source business models.

I think the interests of open source would be better served by allowing licenses that prohibit entities like AWS from running off with the original developers' bread and butter: After all, for open source development to happen, open source developers need to be able to eat.

Restricting the type of business uses or resale, delaying open sourcing to provide an edge to being a paid user, etc. are approaches that, sure, don't meet today's definition according to the OSI, but the end result is more funded open source code for the community to use, eventually at least.

[cycloptic]

If you're trying to describe AWS as being opposed to making open source contributors, this appears to be not true, at least at cursory glance: https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

I always hear these type of complaints about Amazon but it's not clear to me why they're always singled out for doing something vaguely anti-open-source. They don't seem to be doing anything different than any of the other F500 companies that selectively open source things but still produce a lot of closed source. The "traditional" way to deal with companies that don't give back is copyleft. If that's not enough and you want to totally deny access to these companies, that's fine, use a proprietary license. It makes no sense to me to insist on calling that open source, when you yourself would admit to purposefully trying to make it so it's closed source to a certain group of people.