[palata]

Did the author actually want to rant about the "paying people to work on <something>" part, or was it just an excuse to be controversial about the very definition of open source? Not clear to me.

But if it was the former, what a way to shoot oneself in the foot!

[simonw]

The author was fed up of people saying "well actually your achievement in getting paid to work on open source shouldn't be celebrated because of <list of pedantic reasons>" - one of which was license definition arguments. That's why he chose to be controversial about that.

[palata]

I read the article again. Twice. To me the point is really that he is fed up of people criticizing the people instead of the system. And there are interesting discussions to be had around that, e.g.: is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad?

Instead, for some reason he just spends a whole section redefining concepts instead of just admitting that he may have used them wrongly in his toot. Which is not only completely uninteresting but also confusing.

If he had spent as much time redacting his toot than he did writing the "definitions" section, chances are that he would not have been pissed off by the reactions to his toot and would not have had to go on a crusade explaining why whoever disagrees with his poor formulation is a jerk.

[wslack]

> is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad?

I think OP would say its better to work on open source at Meta than closed source at Meta, and we should celebrate someone being paid to write open source. We can also condemn their specific employer while not denigrating their open source compensation.

re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.

[palata]

> re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.

A lot of those discussions are not about the definition of open source (but something closely related, like "does it suck that it is difficult to get a new open source license OSI-approved?" or "should the JSON license be OSI-approved?", etc).

But "open source" is defined, has been for a while, and those who disagree with the meaning and would like to merge "source available" and "open source" are just fighting a useless fight IMO.

And really, in the featured article, the author clearly says "I will redefine 'open source' so that I don't have to say that I was wrong in my toot and in my book". To me it's like if I tooted "my favourite color in the visible spectrum is microwave", got pissed at people telling me that "microwave" is not in the "visible spectrum", and wrote a whole definition section explaining why I can't accept that I was wrong.

[simonw]

"in my book" in that post didn't mean an actual book, it meant "in my opinion".

[palata]

Oh, so it would make it even easier to just accept that the toot had some "unfortunate wording" in that respect.

Again, I do understand the other points. I have a lot of frustrations as a maintainer of (much smaller) open source projects (e.g. all those people that believe I work for them for free and who can come complain and pressure me because of a missing feature they don't even consider contributing). But I think that redefining "open source" is not the solution. On the contrary, IMO we need people to understand the meaning of those licenses better.