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Does anyone care what the opinion of OSI is anymore? If you care enough about whether an agreement is "open source", you probably care enough to read the agree
by jnwatson 7y ago
Does anyone care what the opinion of OSI is anymore? If you care enough about whether an agreement is "open source", you probably care enough to read the agreement itself and make your own opinion.
- bawolff 7y agoI care more about what debian thinks than OSI, but yes i do care. I would read the agreement too, but IANAL nor am i an intellectual property expert. Legal agreements are tricky and can have non-intuitive consequences.
- skybrian 7y agoI care that "open source" doesn't become a watered-down, meaningless term like "open" or "agile". Having a well-defined and well-understood meaning is valuable.
- chrisseaton 7y agoThey should have picked a term that they could trademark if they wanted to do this! Rather than reusing an existing term and having to try to persuade people to use your definition.
- skybrian 7y agoThis usage is over 20 years old and was uncontroversial for most of that time. I'm not sure there are many people around who even remember previous usage. It seems like the problem these days is new people learning it from context and not knowing there is an official definition that was settled a long time ago.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIn what sense is it ‘official’? The trademark office think the term is generic and didn’t allow the OSI to make any claim on it.
- skybrian 7y agoIn the sense that there is a standards organization that published a standard definition. There isn't any legal basis for it, but we should support them.
- chrisseaton 7y agoI think official means endorsed by some authority. There’s no authority here at all - just some private people making up a definition and attaching it to an existing term.
- dec0dedab0de 7y agoauthority does not necessarily mean with the threat of violence. It could mean influence. The OSI are an authority as demonstrated by every major tech company using their definition of opensource.
- justinclift 7y agoThe only noteworthy "use an existing term" happening with it, is people using the term "Open Source" recently trying to fool people into thinking their not-Open-Source-licensed software is.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]