3 ms·

In practice I don't think it's just OSI which gets to decide this. Debian and Red Hat have their own teams determining whether something is Open Source enough

by warp 5y ago

In practice I don't think it's just OSI which gets to decide this. Debian and Red Hat have their own teams determining whether something is Open Source enough to allow into their distributions, and obviously the Free Software Foundation keeps their own list of licenses which they consider Free Software. If these groups of people disagree on whether a particular license is Free/Open Source software, it's not going to be considered an Open Source license by everyone.

busterarm 5y ago
They have every right to dictate the meaning of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software Read the first section.
- kazinator 5y ago
  They have the right to promote the term, under freedom of speech legislation. That's about it.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > They have every right to dictate the meaning of the term. I mean this is just factually not true. They have no such right. They tried to trademark it, but failed because it's just a generic term.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pessimizer 5y ago
  They should have one, but they don't, so it allows parasitic companies to trade on the goodwill that the OSI built up. If you don't think that people who sell carbon-based foods should always be able to sell them as organic, or that any coffee buyer who thinks that they do business fairly should be able to label their product as Fair Trade, you shouldn't think companies that are open about their source code should be able to label themselves Open Source. I'm going to label my company Open Source because we're open about how we source the laptops we programmed the software on. They're MacBook Pros, and you're welcome.
pessimizer 5y ago
The only relationship between Free and Open Source Software is that the bulk of Open Source Software can be relicensed into Free Software (as long as the OSS license stipulations on e.g. including a copy of the license or acknowledging authorship are followed.) The FSF will never claim any interest in deciding what Open Source Software is.

by warp 5y ago

busterarm 5y ago

They have every right to dictate the meaning of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software Read the first section.

kazinator 5y ago
They have the right to promote the term, under freedom of speech legislation. That's about it.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> They have every right to dictate the meaning of the term. I mean this is just factually not true. They have no such right. They tried to trademark it, but failed because it's just a generic term.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pessimizer 5y ago
They should have one, but they don't, so it allows parasitic companies to trade on the goodwill that the OSI built up. If you don't think that people who sell carbon-based foods should always be able to sell them as organic, or that any coffee buyer who thinks that they do business fairly should be able to label their product as Fair Trade, you shouldn't think companies that are open about their source code should be able to label themselves Open Source. I'm going to label my company Open Source because we're open about how we source the laptops we programmed the software on. They're MacBook Pros, and you're welcome.

pessimizer 5y ago

The only relationship between Free and Open Source Software is that the bulk of Open Source Software can be relicensed into Free Software (as long as the OSS license stipulations on e.g. including a copy of the license or acknowledging authorship are followed.) The FSF will never claim any interest in deciding what Open Source Software is.