[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.

[teddyh]

Yes, and? The FSF may disagree with the OSI on some matters, but the FSF does agree on the definition of the term “Open Source”, which was what we were discussing. Do you have a different definition of “Open Source” (as applied to software), and why should that definition take precedence over that of the definition from the 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.