7 ms·

The people have decided that "open source" means OSI open source. Therefore that is its effective definition. Which means > If you want to be specific about th

The people have decided that "open source" means OSI open source. Therefore that is its effective definition. Which means > If you want to be specific about the meaning of open source, just say "OSI open source" or something. is wrong. "OSI open source" and "open source" are synonyms.

mindcrime 6y ago
The people have decided that "open source" means OSI open source. Therefore that is its effective definition. Which means Exactly. In common, everyday usage, when people talk about "Open Source" this is what the majority mean. It's not a "de jure" definition, but it is a "de facto" definition. Open Source means compliance with the OSD. There are terms for those other licenses - "shared source", "source available", etc. Use them if that's what you mean.
konjin 6y ago
>The people have decided that "open source" means OSI open source. I am the people. I do not agree. Now what?
- mindcrime 6y ago
  * Now what?* Worst case? You walk through use life using terms in non-standard, idiosyncratic ways, and people are constantly confused by your speech, or argue with you because you don't have a shared understanding of the world.
  - shkkmo 6y ago
    Except it isn't really idiosyncratic since there appears to be widespread confusion as to the meaning of that term. You can't just hand wave that ambiguity away and pretend that only the OSI definition is understood and used. You have to accept the "open source" is an ambiguous term and you will need to use qualifiers or additional context if you want to avoid ambiguity when using that term.
    - _carbyau_ 6y ago
      Agreed. One of the issues is that from a Venn diagram or set theory point of view, all "Free Software"(by FSF definition) is "Open Source", but not all "Open Source" is "Free Software". Yet people really only know of Open Source as a common term to describe these projects.
      - anoncake 6y ago
        What software is open source but not free? The difference is a philosophical one, not one of definitions.
        _carbyau_ 6y ago
        Uh, it is a practical one as being described in this thread. Simply because the source is openly available to read, the licence can still say "you can read but no touchy touchy or compiling it". While technically it doesn't stop you from actually doing this, in a court of law you'd be found to have violated the licence. So it wrecks the idea of businesses doing it, because usually the licence holder won't care unless someone is making money from it. Free software lets you do whatever you want, but you gotta show your code. Big difference in practice, especially when it comes to running a business.
        anoncake 6y ago
        No it is not, because what you describe isn't open source.
madhadron 6y ago
Nope. The debate in the community before OSI existed was between free software and open source as terms. Free software was the term preferred by the FSF and the GNU project, with their more stringent notions of free. "Open source" was the term coined counter to that to describe things like BSD licensed code. The OSI was founded as a way of promoting this whole world of software development to businesses, and they focused on "open source" as a labeling strategy so they could distance themselves from the FSF. The OSI is really just a way of branding certain licenses so IT departments at companies can point their legal departments at the website and say, "Look, this is legit." We forget today that in the 1990's people would assume that software they didn't pay for was shoddy, or that if they were running it, it was stolen and they were going to be audited and sued. I think Amazon running their own ElasticSearch service and competing with Elastic is entirely faithful to the original spirit of free software, where Stallman was backporting innovations from commercial Lisp Machines onto the MIT free Lisp Machine OS that anyone could use. There is the model right now of founding a company to host your software or similar as a funding model. While it is popular, I doubt it is any more sustainable than any of the other models we've seen. My lesson from all of this is that capitalism lacks funding mechanisms for producing commons, and that the proper solution is to produce non-capitalist avenues for doing so.
- anoncake 6y ago
  The BSD licenses (that are in use today) are considered free software licenses and always have been. The FSF doesn't prefer them because they aren't copyleft.

mindcrime 6y ago

The people have decided that "open source" means OSI open source. Therefore that is its effective definition. Which means Exactly. In common, everyday usage, when people talk about "Open Source" this is what the majority mean. It's not a "de jure" definition, but it is a "de facto" definition. Open Source means compliance with the OSD. There are terms for those other licenses - "shared source", "source available", etc. Use them if that's what you mean.

konjin 6y ago

>The people have decided that "open source" means OSI open source. I am the people. I do not agree. Now what?

mindcrime 6y ago
* Now what?* Worst case? You walk through use life using terms in non-standard, idiosyncratic ways, and people are constantly confused by your speech, or argue with you because you don't have a shared understanding of the world.
- shkkmo 6y ago
  Except it isn't really idiosyncratic since there appears to be widespread confusion as to the meaning of that term. You can't just hand wave that ambiguity away and pretend that only the OSI definition is understood and used. You have to accept the "open source" is an ambiguous term and you will need to use qualifiers or additional context if you want to avoid ambiguity when using that term.
  - _carbyau_ 6y ago
    Agreed. One of the issues is that from a Venn diagram or set theory point of view, all "Free Software"(by FSF definition) is "Open Source", but not all "Open Source" is "Free Software". Yet people really only know of Open Source as a common term to describe these projects.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      What software is open source but not free? The difference is a philosophical one, not one of definitions.
      - _carbyau_ 6y ago
        Uh, it is a practical one as being described in this thread. Simply because the source is openly available to read, the licence can still say "you can read but no touchy touchy or compiling it". While technically it doesn't stop you from actually doing this, in a court of law you'd be found to have violated the licence. So it wrecks the idea of businesses doing it, because usually the licence holder won't care unless someone is making money from it. Free software lets you do whatever you want, but you gotta show your code. Big difference in practice, especially when it comes to running a business.
        anoncake 6y ago
        No it is not, because what you describe isn't open source.

madhadron 6y ago

Nope. The debate in the community before OSI existed was between free software and open source as terms. Free software was the term preferred by the FSF and the GNU project, with their more stringent notions of free. "Open source" was the term coined counter to that to describe things like BSD licensed code. The OSI was founded as a way of promoting this whole world of software development to businesses, and they focused on "open source" as a labeling strategy so they could distance themselves from the FSF. The OSI is really just a way of branding certain licenses so IT departments at companies can point their legal departments at the website and say, "Look, this is legit." We forget today that in the 1990's people would assume that software they didn't pay for was shoddy, or that if they were running it, it was stolen and they were going to be audited and sued. I think Amazon running their own ElasticSearch service and competing with Elastic is entirely faithful to the original spirit of free software, where Stallman was backporting innovations from commercial Lisp Machines onto the MIT free Lisp Machine OS that anyone could use. There is the model right now of founding a company to host your software or similar as a funding model. While it is popular, I doubt it is any more sustainable than any of the other models we've seen. My lesson from all of this is that capitalism lacks funding mechanisms for producing commons, and that the proper solution is to produce non-capitalist avenues for doing so.

anoncake 6y ago
The BSD licenses (that are in use today) are considered free software licenses and always have been. The FSF doesn't prefer them because they aren't copyleft.