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by kube-system 1161 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
teddyh 1161 days ago
> 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....

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kube-system 1161 days ago
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

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teddyh 1161 days ago
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”?
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kube-system 1161 days ago
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.
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teddyh 1161 days ago
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?
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kube-system 1161 days ago
There are many people who use the term differently. I am not arguing that any of them “take precedence”.

I am saying the exact opposite: that more than one definition may be valid, because the English lexicon is both descriptive and additive.

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