People keep claiming that this is a somehow established definition of “open source” (or Open Source or OpEnSoUrCe), but when I look at the people around me it s

People keep claiming that this is a somehow established definition of “open source” (or Open Source or OpEnSoUrCe), but when I look at the people around me it seems a vast (silent) majority actually uses the term that way. “Open source”, in my personal “tests”, means “the source is open.” You may balk at this, but notice the elegance of the definition corresponding to the meaning of the actual words. Free Software is more commonly understood as what people sometimes religiously defend as the meaning of “open source”. Then someone comes along wagging his finger online saying no, no, no, that’s not what that word means. Just like with “could care less”. You know what? I think the battle is lost. Language doesn’t work that way, and I’m going to call it: Open Source means open source, i.e. source is open. And we would do ourselves a great favour switching to a different term, because we’re swimming upstream in this one. While we’re on the subject of poor names: the worst mistake Stallman made was calling his movement Free Software. He would have turned a strong undercurrent of PR in his favour [e: by calling it Freedom Software] instead of having to constantly battle the semantics of “Free as in Freedom of Speech, not Free as in Free Beer.” When people say naming things is one of the two hardest things in programming, I’m wondering if it’s just because programmers are really bad at it.