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by 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....

1 comments

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

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”?
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.
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?
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.

To bring it back to the point: The article claimed that “NLLB (No Language Left Behind) has been open sourced by Facebook”, which is misleading, since “open source” has a strict definition, and the license of NLLB did not qualify with the very first point in the OSI Open Source Definition. Facebook released the source code, under an open license; they could even call it a Creative Commons license, which it was. But the article can’t truthfully call it “open source”, since it isn’t.