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People also misuse the term "public domain" to refer to a wide variety of things that mostly amount to "I found it somewhere and I want to use it". That doesn't
by JoshTriplett 7y ago
People also misuse the term "public domain" to refer to a wide variety of things that mostly amount to "I found it somewhere and I want to use it". That doesn't make it correct.
There's a difference between an unintentional mistake of loose terminology, and someone intentionally trying to create confusion and FUD for their own benefit. In the former case, I've run into multiple people who did appreciate learning what "open source" actually means. (I'm in a position of providing mentorship on a variety of topics, including on FOSS.) In the latter case, anyone trying to misleadingly brand their software as open while using a license that isn't actually open needs a strong response; the companies engaging in such misleading practices are unlikely to listen to that response themselves, but many of their customers and potential users will listen, and steer clear.
We don't need to invent new terms. We have terms. We need to discourage misuse of the terms we have. If (hypothetically) we invented a new term and that term caught on, then people would try to abuse that term. There's an incentive to latch onto the popular terminology while attempting to work around its requirements; there needs to be a strong disincentive to doing so, as well.
- kemitchell 7y agoWhen a large number of people use a word to mean something, that's what the word means. My definition of "public domain" doesn't trump their definition, just because I'm a lawyer or a programmer or somehow more specific. Neither does James Boyle's or Larry Lessig's. The first group to latch onto "open source" was OSI. "Open" had been a buzzword in computing for a whole generation before. The media didn't eat up ESR's line because OSI had a definition or a license list. Initially, it had neither. The media ate it up because of the software, which hadn't been called by that name before. Nobody's abusing anything here but OSI's sense of entitlement. Comment above is right: there's no exclusive right to the term.