[saghm]

> "Why are we open-sourcing the Wasm backend?"

I remember this debate when the SSPL was debuted, and I think for the most part people have switched to using the term "source available" for licenses like this, but I don't think it occurred to me before now: what's the "verb" form of "source available"? The best I can come up with is "making the source available".

I mostly find this all pretty silly because "available" seems to basically be a synonym of a certain meaning of the word "open". It reminds me a lot of the whole "free as in freedom" versus "free as in beer", except for the difference between the two types of "open" being way more ambiguous. As far as I can tell, the question mostly boils down to disagreements about how "open" something needs to be in order to qualify; in other words, it's about the degree of openness and where to draw the line. With things like this, I always tend to prefer drawing the line somewhere as easily identified as possible, so drawing the line at "is the source literally possible to obtain or not?" feels like a much more obvious question to answer than "is the list of things I'm allowed to do with the source sufficient for me to do the things that I think I should be allowed to do?".

I recognize that this is already a lost battle, but it really feels like the consensus opinion had a lot more to do with posturing than what people actually would expect words to mean, which is disappointing to me as a descriptivist.

[jchw]

To me it's neither here nor there. Personally, I wouldn't touch SSPL software, not because there's anything particularly wrong with non-open source licenses, but because I think the SSPL is just a terrible copyright license anyways.

The OSI and people who supported the OSI, for better or worse, put a lot of effort into branding for open source that I think we can all agree was extremely successful. There's no reason that this sort of thing can't be done for "fair source" or "source available" or whatever you want to call it. That said, it's an issue for proponents of this license model to sort out in my opinion.

[saghm]

Yeah, I guess I just don't feel like putting effort into branding means that it gives them a permanent right to define the term in a way that's not intuitive. If they want to make a term that they can define however they want, the mechanism for that is a trademark, and the mechanism for enforcing that is legal, not social. Outside of that, I'm pretty much always going to be on the side of language being used in a simple straightforward way rather than for the benefit of a singular entity.

[jchw]

Well, they don't have the right to define anything, but this isn't a matter of law. "Open source" is industry jargon, it is well-understood in the industry, and very few experts are going to disagree, especially not by many of the people and projects that popularized the term "open source" to a wider audience, like Linux.

They could've chosen a phrase less likely to be mistaken, that was not already in use, and this might've saved us a lot of arguing. But then again, the term "free software" could've won out instead, and things would be even worse. Personally, I think it'll be OK.

[cxr]

> what's the "verb" form of "source available"?

"We are publishing the source code for our Wasm backend." It's not hard to work out.