| > Does similar confusion exist when asking people what the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative or Sustainable Energy Initiatives are about? Do you think there is a similar level of misperception among laypersons about the meaning of those initiatives? I think most lay persons, upon being informed of the existence of a "Sustainable Energy Initiative", would readily admit when pressed to a lack of sufficient familiarity with the subject that would allow them to answer with confidence about what does or does not meet the standards of being deemed "sustainable energy". Likewise with anything involving "cancer"—most people cannot define it. But this is beside the point, because we're not talking about the work activity of the OSI. We're taking about the definition of "open source". This is not the first instance of your moving the goalposts in this discussion. > The common misperception regarding "Free Software" is that people think it means "gratis" rather than "libre". The common misperception with "Open Source" is that people think it means "source-code publicly available". Right. The key thing being that those are misperceptions. Misperceptions about the distinction between "cancer" versus "viral infection" versus "bacterial infection" would not lead us to say that because the public does not have a good understanding then the definition of "cancer" changes to something that it isn't. > if the argument about common misperceptions being muddied water is not entirely convincing That's not what's at issue. > The Free Software Foundation disagrees that "Open Source" and "Free Software" are the same thing. The FSF agrees that the definition of "open source" is the one that was formulated at the end of the last millennium; the FSF doesn't disagree with the OSI about the definition of "open source". We started with your claim from the ahistorical definition of "open source" that a given project may not actually permit people to make their fork available to others. Any argument you make here needs to support that. So far, you're making a lot of facile "water _is_ wet*"-style observations and, I dunno, hoping that no one will notice that that was never the point of contention. * Try substituting "FSF was founded in 1985" (or any other factual statement) here that while true nonetheless has no bearing on the actual substance of the current dispute, despite whatever surface-level relevance it may appear to have to someone who is only halfway paying attention. |
How people use words matters almost as much as what those words mean - and meaning can change because of how people use words over the course of years, decades, or centuries. Pointing at a dictionary is only useful when clarifying which meaning is being used.
> That's not what's at issue.
Then what is the issue, if you don't mind me asking? The issue as I understand it was what was meant by "open source" and my not already prescribing to the OSI's definition of it. Pointing to the OSI's definition cleared the air about which definition was being used but did not resolve the issue that the phrasing is easily misunderstood outside of the OSS community and is the reason the term "FLOSS" exists to circumvent the issue. The fact they had to specify the definition as defined by OSI and not "source available" is part of the issue. That this misperception exists at all is part of the issue. That the OSI has had to plea with people to please use the branding how they want it to be used [0] is part of the issue. That it is not totally uncommon to see "open source" to only mean "source available" is part of the issue. That "open source" has an obvious plain-English meaning separate from it's "intended meaning" is part of the issue. This is an issue that has existed in the community for the entirety of its 23 years of existence, been spoken about at length by both the OSI and FSF as being an issue, and some people are acting like it's the first time they've ever heard about this being an issue or even denying that it is an existing issue at all.
I'm not sure how many articles from community leaders and the very people who defined the words in the first place speaking about the issue being an issue I need to cite before people go "OK maybe it is an existing issue and not just Nadya saying it's an existing issue when it isn't."
To actually and intentionally move the goalposts this time: It still isn't even logically sound that because you're able to fork and send a PR on Github that the project is "open source" to begin with and it especially doesn't follow that the project is compliant with OSI's definition of "open source". Per my understanding of the Github Terms of Service Section D Parts 4-7 the license given to other users only extends so far as to their using Github's functionality (including "forking") - which I'm reading as not providing any license to compile or redistribute modified source code compiled into an executable. Making sending a PR possibly the only reasonable method of ensuring that a fix or feature makes it to end users.
[0] https://opensource.org/node/163