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by pbhjpbhj
4386 days ago
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>Open source means the source is available under an open source license, as recognized by the OSI. // I've been part of the [F]OSS community (mainly on the receiving side!) for ~15 years but have never seen it specified that OSS has to comply with an OSI definition. "open source" [de-capitalisation is purposeful to distinguish with "Open Source [OSD]"] has always simply meant that the source was available to view for those the program was distributed to. For example - IIRC - Star Office was a paid application initially but was open source as those who purchased it could request the source code. Way back in the day people/companies would even make nominal charges to cover media and distribution of the source and still be "open source". Of course not all open source is free-gratis, clearly one can charge for open source. But, moreover, not all open source is free-libre either, just being open source doesn't mean that you have to have a GPL/LGPL/Berkley/CC or whatever compatible license. I'm pretty sure I recall the OSI starting; we had open source software before that. The OSI's "Open Source" is not coterminous with "open source". For example someone distributing a linux distro that specified that no proprietary software could be bundled as part of the distro would be excluded by the OSI's definition from terming the distro "Open Source" whilst it could very clearly be completely open source. Similarly if you say "may not be used for development or activation or control of weapons designed to cause harm" as part of your license you can allow any type of source manipulation you like but the OSI's definition would say your software is not "Open Source". FOSS (Free [-libre] Open Source Software) gives you the freedom to modify and reuse it, though there still might be relicensing controls. That's why we have FOSS and OSS definitions in the first place, the Free-libre bit wouldn't be necessary otherwise. No need to try and overload the language to push an ideological position like OSI appear to have done. |
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