[benatkin]

I used lower case deliberately as well.

It's a term that excludes source available not just because of OSI but because of the original community. And members of the current community can argue for a new, weaker, openwashed meaning of it, but people can always look back to the early days and see the true meaning of it.

[lolinder]

What "original community" are you referring to here? Are we talking about the free software movement that Richard Stallman founded, or the Open Source Initiative that forked off of the movement in an effort to be more friendly to businesses?

It's a bit ironic that people now wax lyrical about the "true meaning" of Open Source when the OSI described their origin like this (emphasis added):

> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

[benatkin]

> What "original community" are you referring to here?

It's a big community with a wide range of perspectives, but not so big that it can't be understood. To me the original community was mostly over a decade or two. This is similar to other communities such as a burgeoning genre of music. Whatever it was, it was established long before the words "Business Source License" were uttered. The first date range that comes to mind is 1993 to 2003 if it's one decade, or 1990 to 2010 if it's two decades. With the smaller range, you have the development of Linux, and the way Linux took over servers. With the larger range, there is Firefox taking on IE, as well as WordPress, Django, and Ruby on Rails becoming popular.

Even people who tried to fight it understand it. That is why before the deliberately misleading strategy being used now, some who wanted to promote code that could be read but couldn't freely be used settled for calling source available.

[lolinder]

Again, though—you're fighting for the moral integrity of a term that was explicitly coined to try to buck the moralizing that was associated with the Free Software movement and make the new concept of Open Source more appealing to corporations.

The BSL isn't the first sign of the bastardization of the ideal behind Linux. The bastardization started as soon as the OSI decided that they needed to appeal to corporations, and in condemning the BSL the OSI is just following the same business-friendly playbook they've held to all along.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that the OSI provided a watered-down version of free software that got us to where we are today. I just disapprove of the moralizing that surrounds them when they were explicitly founded on pragmatism.

[palata]

> condemning the BSL

Are they "condemning" the BSL by saying "it is bad, don't use it", or are they just saying "BSL is not open source"?

Because my understanding is that BSL is not open source. Rather it is a commitment of becoming open source (GPLv2) at a point later (maximum 4 years). So BSL is effectively source available until GPLv2 is added. Which does not make BSL open source: GPLv2 is.

[lolinder]

> Are they "condemning" the BSL by saying "it is bad, don't use it", or are they just saying "BSL is not open source"?

Fair enough, others condemn it on the grounds that the OSI says its not open source.

> Because my understanding is that BSL is not open source. Rather it is a commitment of becoming open source (GPLv2) at a point later (maximum 4 years). So BSL is effectively source available until GPLv2 is added. Which does not make BSL open source: GPLv2 is.

See TFA and my comments above. A substantial number of people believe that we need to reevaluate what counts as "open source" in the post-cloud era, which I see as a completely reasonable discussion to have given that the term "open source" was specifically coined to be a pragmatic and business-focused alternative to "free software".

[palata]

IMO it's all a moot point. If people condemn the BSL because it's not truly open source as per the current definition of open source, changing the definition will not change their opinion. So yeah, changing the definition can trick a few people into believing that BSL is open source, and then maybe we will invent a new word to define what we currently call "open source". But that sounds ridiculous. Just invent a word for "open source + BSL" if it really matters to you...

It's not a philosophical question at this point, it's really just a definition.