[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]

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

Interesting. The attendees of the meeting on February 3rd, 1998 certainly all seem to think that they at least independently re-invented the term, so the term can’t have been very common. The meeting was held two weeks after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code, and the announcement did not use the term.