[kube-system]

"open source" has a broader English meaning that predates the OSI for at least several decades. OSI does not have a trademark on "open source" because of this.

This is the software licensing world's version of "a hotdog is not a sandwich"

[rnd0]

"open source" has a specific, standard useage and meaning in the software world and has had since at least 1998 and to be honest probably before.

For the last 25 years, in the software field, the common usage has been the one from the OSI.

Of course contrarians will disagree. Contrarians will always be contrary and may be safely ignored.

[kube-system]

And most people do not call a hot dog a sandwich. Yet, enough do that it is valid English.

[teddyh]

A lot of people confuse, say, Switzerland and Sweden, but this does not make it valid to call either by the other name. Likewise, “Open Source” has a precise definition, and people being confused does not make it less so. Of course, a lot of people are not actually confused, but are engaging disingenuously in order to dilute the term, so that they can use it for their own ends.

[kube-system]

English isn't prescriptive. In English, if people use a word or a phrase to mean a thing, it means that thing. OSI has a widely observed technical definition, but it is not universal, and more colloquial uses of the word are recognized by linguists because they factually exist.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open-source

[teddyh]

It would be one thing if you made that argument about some old term, like “mountain”, or “island”; those have definitions, but the edges are fuzzy and vary, since the terms are old and saturated since prehistorical times. With “Open Source”, it’s different. The wording existed previously, yes, but only as a technical term in intelligence gathering. Applied to software, on the other hand, the term is new, created by the OSI, which gave it a strict definition from day one. People cannot have heard of the term unless it came from OSI. Any claim of deviation from the OSI meaning, then, can be simply discarded as incorrect.

This debate is beyond silly. It’s like arguing about what the rules of, say, Settlers of Catan is. The rules are the official rules which come with the box; anything else is house rules or custom rules, and cannot be used in something like an official tournament. When people say that “Settlers of Catan does this thing X”, and the official rules expressly says it does not do X, they are (knowingly or not) being misleading.

[kube-system]

> The wording existed previously, yes, but only as a technical term in intelligence gathering. Applied to software, on the other hand, the term is new, created by the OSI, which gave it a strict definition from day one. People cannot have heard of the term unless it came from OSI. Any claim of deviation from the OSI meaning, then, can be simply discarded as incorrect.

All of these claims are untrue. Here is an example of open source being used to describe software in 1996. OSI was founded in 1998.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180402143912/http://www.xent.c...

> This debate is beyond silly. It’s like arguing about what the rules of, say, Settlers of Catan

Commercial board games typically use trademark law to prevent others from changing their rules. Popular games which do not have legally protected names often do have multiple sets of rules defined by different people. e.g poker.

[teddyh]

The definition of “open source” is universally agreed upon to have the OSI-defined meaning, except for some people:

1. Intelligence community people, who have long understood the term “open source” to mean a source of intelligence which is not itself secret.

2. People who, without having ever looked it up, assume it means that the source code is available for reading. These people are simply ignorant, and should be using the term “source available” instead, since it means exactly that.

3. People who want to be able to use the “open source” term for their software to gain goodwill, but don’t want to actually give all of the freedoms it should guarantee. These people are dishonest shills who try to confuse the debate in order to get away with fraudulent labeling.

(Repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29332056)

[kube-system]

> People who want to be able to use the “open source” term for their software to gain goodwill, but don’t want to actually give all of the freedoms it should guarantee.

Or is "open source" just a term for "free" as in beer software that doesn't actually give people all the freedoms it should guarantee? Because that's what the FSF thinks.

Different people have different ideas about what freedoms people "should" have. Nobody is being dishonest about software freedoms when the BSD-4-clause was written, CC0 or when they write licenses with 'no evil' or 'no nuclear proliferation' clauses.

[teddyh]

> Or is "open source" just a term for "free" as in beer software that doesn't actually give people all the freedoms it should guarantee? Because that's what the FSF thinks.

No it isn’t. The OSI invented the term "Open Source” as applied to software, and they get to define its meaning as what they intended.

> Because that's what the FSF thinks.

No they don’t. The FSF completely accepts the OSI definition of the term “Open Source”: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

[kube-system]

You misread my comment. That page explains why the FSF does in fact believe that open source software does not give people the freedoms it "should" guarantee.

The freedoms that a license "should" convey is not a fact, it is an opinion. And there are more than a few valid and honest opinions that exist, even beyond the opinions of FSF/OSI/CC/UCB/USG/Apache/FAANG/whoever

[teddyh]

How is that relevant? What does the opinion of FSF (about what a licence “should” contain) have to do what you consider to be the proper meaning of the term “Open Source”?

[kube-system]

It is a response to your point numbered "3." above. There are honest and good-willed licenses which are not OSI, written by honest and good-willed people who disagree with OSI.

[HDThoreaun]

I disagree. You don’t get to decide what words mean. Open source means open source, that’s it. If you want it to mean something else you should’ve chosen a phrase that didn’t already have a meaning.

[teddyh]

Sometimes old words and terms acquire new meanings. The only meaning “Open Source” had before the OSI was the intelligence “open sources” meaning. Is this the only meaning of “Open Source” you accept? If not, what is your definition, and why should that prevail over the OSI definition?

[HDThoreaun]

I accept that different people think it means different things, which makes me want to create a new phrase that doesn't already have a meaning. open software? Not sure, but communication is hard when you co-opt phrases that have intuitive meaning and try to supercede that.

[teddyh]

Whatever meaning you have in mind, I’m pretty sure there’s already a term for it. What is the meaning that you want to express?

[naniwaduni]

Unfortunately, phrases are made of words that mean things.

[morelisp]

> "open source" has a broader English meaning that predates the OSI for at least several decades.

It is also not data collected by an intelligence agency or law enforcement from public sources.

[kube-system]

It isn't. But those who coined it were aware of it being used for that purpose. https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...