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by teddyh
1161 days ago
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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. |
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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.