6 ms·

I really hate the hijacking of the term "open source" by the OSI. I think open source is a generic term that should mean what it says -- the source is open, i.e

I really hate the hijacking of the term "open source" by the OSI. I think open source is a generic term that should mean what it says -- the source is open, i.e., accessible and modifiable. I don't think that the distribution limitations should go into it. While I certainly appreciate all the open-source projects that allow commercial usage, I really think that a trend of projects using non-commercial or licensee-only licenses would do a lot of good, because as it stands I'd rather have the source code for every program I use even if I'm not allowed to share that code with someone who hasn't paid the original author. I recognize that copyleft and all that is important and good, but I think we'd see much more source availability if people were less rabid about their demands for unlimited distribution. Unlimited distribution is rad but it greatly reduces the effective profitability of the product, and there's some software that just doesn't get made if it doesn't have some cash behind it.

kragen 15y ago
> I really hate the hijacking of the term "open source" by the OSI. The OSI was founded a couple of months after the invention of the term "open-source software", by the same people who invented the term. They aren't the ones who are "hijacking" it. You are. It's dishonest. Please stop doing it, and please stop attempting to rewrite history in order to justify your dishonest attempt to hijack the term. The people who read HN aren't so ignorant that you can fool them that way.
- chc 15y ago
  What's the correct term, in your opinion?
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    I've heard the term "shared source" used.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - pessimizer 15y ago
    How about "The source code is available"?
  - alttag 15y ago
    Isn't this why we have the disambiguators gratis and libre? Or, if you prefer, “... as in beer” and “... as in speech.”
  - Retric 15y ago
    I don't think he cares he was clearly just trolling.
- ShirtlessRod 15y ago
  Are you really going to claim that no one has ever used the generic term "open source" prior to the folks in the OSI?
  - kragen 15y ago
    Yes, that is correct. No one, as far as I can tell, ever used the generic term "open source" (for software, not intelligence) prior to the folks in the OSI. There were a few cases you can find on Usenet of people saying "open source code", but that's not the same thing; "open" there modifies "code", rather than modifying "source". You can read the history at http://www.opensource.org/history http://www.opensource.org/history. I wasn't at the meeting, but I was part of the community for years before that, and I was part of the email exchange that followed that led up to the formation of the OSI. Although I'm no fan of ESR, I can attest that the OSI folks' claim to have invented the term is legitimate and correct.
    - ShirtlessRod 15y ago
      You appear to be splitting hairs here. Most folks I know frequently say "source" as a shorthand for "source code". It's not a big leap to tack on "open" in front of that when you mean the source is available for inspection by those outside the person/company who developed it (i.e., not "closed"). If you want to claim that OSI popularized the phrase and imbued it with a very specific meaning, you'd probably have a point, but I don't see how they could lay claim to ownership of such a generic term. At the very least it seems out of bounds to be accusing someone of being "dishonest" about it and "rewriting history".
      - kragen 15y ago
        > It's not a big leap to tack on "open" in front of that when you mean the source is available for inspection by those outside the person/company who developed it (i.e., not "closed"). Yet digging through Usenet, web, and mailing-list archives has not, so far, found a single example of anyone making that leap prior to the 1998 meeting.
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  See here for usages of "open source" prior to 1998, when OSI was founded: http://groups.google.com/groups/search?as_q=&as_epq=open+source&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&scoring=&lr=&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=31&as_maxm=12&as_maxy=1997 http://groups.google.com/groups/search?as_q=&as_epq=open... You can see on the first page results from 94, 95, 96 all used to refer to "open source" code, i.e., a program whose source code was available to users. That's just the first page. The term had gained sufficient prevalence to be mentioned in a press release from 1996. There's only one hit on the first page (for me, at least) that refers to "open source" in another context ("unable to open source file"). That's just the first page, there are many more pages of hits.
  - kragen 15y ago
    That's not '"open source" code', that's 'open "source code"', and almost all the hits Google finds for "open source code" are duplicates of a single press release about Willows TWIN. The rest of the page (for me) is almost entirely about open-source intelligence, which has nothing at all to do with software or source code, but rather refers to reports that CIA and related agencies produce by reading public information like what's in the newspapers. That's what the Open Source Solutions 1994 conference was, for example. You can save yourself the trouble of looking through the many more pages of hits. I've done it before.
    - chc 15y ago
      The word "source" is short for "source code." They aren't exactly distinct things, so that is really splitting hairs. If we acknowledge that use of "open," then "open source" falls right out of it. And there are lot of the dupes you're talking about, but if you filter those out in your search, you'll see that is not the only occurrence. Quickly sifting through, I found these: From 1995 we have a guy asking for a "modeler with open source code." 1996 has Caldera advocating "an open-source code model" (it even has the hyphen in the right place!), as well as an essay about "Open Source Code and the Early Development of Unix." The former case is interesting because it explicitly defines open-source code as source code that is openly distributed, and clarifies that a small fee is required to sell derived products commercially. (So SCO actually claimed the term before OSI did!) And 1997 has a discussion about whether "open source cryptography" is better than "proprietary … cryptography" (and in which "published" is used as a synonym for "open source"). So it appears that the term was much less common before OSI — but it was used to talk about source code you could read, long before they came along with their definition.

kragen 15y ago

> I really hate the hijacking of the term "open source" by the OSI. The OSI was founded a couple of months after the invention of the term "open-source software", by the same people who invented the term. They aren't the ones who are "hijacking" it. You are. It's dishonest. Please stop doing it, and please stop attempting to rewrite history in order to justify your dishonest attempt to hijack the term. The people who read HN aren't so ignorant that you can fool them that way.

chc 15y ago
What's the correct term, in your opinion?
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  I've heard the term "shared source" used.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- pessimizer 15y ago
  How about "The source code is available"?
- alttag 15y ago
  Isn't this why we have the disambiguators gratis and libre? Or, if you prefer, “... as in beer” and “... as in speech.”
- Retric 15y ago
  I don't think he cares he was clearly just trolling.
ShirtlessRod 15y ago
Are you really going to claim that no one has ever used the generic term "open source" prior to the folks in the OSI?
- kragen 15y ago
  Yes, that is correct. No one, as far as I can tell, ever used the generic term "open source" (for software, not intelligence) prior to the folks in the OSI. There were a few cases you can find on Usenet of people saying "open source code", but that's not the same thing; "open" there modifies "code", rather than modifying "source". You can read the history at http://www.opensource.org/history http://www.opensource.org/history. I wasn't at the meeting, but I was part of the community for years before that, and I was part of the email exchange that followed that led up to the formation of the OSI. Although I'm no fan of ESR, I can attest that the OSI folks' claim to have invented the term is legitimate and correct.
  - ShirtlessRod 15y ago
    You appear to be splitting hairs here. Most folks I know frequently say "source" as a shorthand for "source code". It's not a big leap to tack on "open" in front of that when you mean the source is available for inspection by those outside the person/company who developed it (i.e., not "closed"). If you want to claim that OSI popularized the phrase and imbued it with a very specific meaning, you'd probably have a point, but I don't see how they could lay claim to ownership of such a generic term. At the very least it seems out of bounds to be accusing someone of being "dishonest" about it and "rewriting history".
    - kragen 15y ago
      > It's not a big leap to tack on "open" in front of that when you mean the source is available for inspection by those outside the person/company who developed it (i.e., not "closed"). Yet digging through Usenet, web, and mailing-list archives has not, so far, found a single example of anyone making that leap prior to the 1998 meeting.
cookiecaper 15y ago
See here for usages of "open source" prior to 1998, when OSI was founded: http://groups.google.com/groups/search?as_q=&as_epq=open+source&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&scoring=&lr=&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1981&as_maxd=31&as_maxm=12&as_maxy=1997 http://groups.google.com/groups/search?as_q=&as_epq=open... You can see on the first page results from 94, 95, 96 all used to refer to "open source" code, i.e., a program whose source code was available to users. That's just the first page. The term had gained sufficient prevalence to be mentioned in a press release from 1996. There's only one hit on the first page (for me, at least) that refers to "open source" in another context ("unable to open source file"). That's just the first page, there are many more pages of hits.
- kragen 15y ago
  That's not '"open source" code', that's 'open "source code"', and almost all the hits Google finds for "open source code" are duplicates of a single press release about Willows TWIN. The rest of the page (for me) is almost entirely about open-source intelligence, which has nothing at all to do with software or source code, but rather refers to reports that CIA and related agencies produce by reading public information like what's in the newspapers. That's what the Open Source Solutions 1994 conference was, for example. You can save yourself the trouble of looking through the many more pages of hits. I've done it before.
  - chc 15y ago
    The word "source" is short for "source code." They aren't exactly distinct things, so that is really splitting hairs. If we acknowledge that use of "open," then "open source" falls right out of it. And there are lot of the dupes you're talking about, but if you filter those out in your search, you'll see that is not the only occurrence. Quickly sifting through, I found these: From 1995 we have a guy asking for a "modeler with open source code." 1996 has Caldera advocating "an open-source code model" (it even has the hyphen in the right place!), as well as an essay about "Open Source Code and the Early Development of Unix." The former case is interesting because it explicitly defines open-source code as source code that is openly distributed, and clarifies that a small fee is required to sell derived products commercially. (So SCO actually claimed the term before OSI did!) And 1997 has a discussion about whether "open source cryptography" is better than "proprietary … cryptography" (and in which "published" is used as a synonym for "open source"). So it appears that the term was much less common before OSI — but it was used to talk about source code you could read, long before they came along with their definition.