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> I’ve seen highly skilled and intelligent engineers fall for the trap of calling Obsidian open source because they can inspect the code of the Electon app; for

> I’ve seen highly skilled and intelligent engineers fall for the trap of calling Obsidian open source because they can inspect the code of the Electon app; forgetting that doesn’t actually grant them a license to do anything with the code. That's because the terminology is pretty confusing, doubly so for ESL people. If you'd never had the whole open software vs. free software debate, it's easy to think that "open source" means "source code available", as this is pretty much in line with the direct reading of the phrase.

klez 2y ago
The term "open source" has had a precise meaning in software since at least 1998. It's only recently that people have started bickering about it being confusing. Exactly when these "source available" clauses started popping up more frequently and people started noticing that some of the previous open source business models are not compatible with a SaaS world.
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  To be clear, only claimed exactly so by open source (and not free software or general F/OSS) proponents. The term was also applied to non-software licenses with related but substantially different meanings.
  - ensignavenger 2y ago
    There was no significant use of the term "open source" applying to software prior to the OSI. Contrast that with Free Software, which was a term in common use before the FSF. The idea that "Free Software" is a more precisely defined concept that Open Source is simply not true.
    - lifthrasiir 2y ago
      > Contrast that with Free Software, which was a term in common use before the FSF. I believe a term "freeware" was much better known even back then. Also, I do think "free software" is also a badly chosen term for a different reason. But we are only talking about the term "open source", so... "Open source" is a badly chosen term because it gives too much weight to the adjective "open". There is no inherent notion of "openness" about source code, so people would instead imagine something that is related to source code but can be thought to be "open". That's why "open" source was heavily associated with "open" governance even though the definition speaks nothing about governance. This confusion is pretty much intentional by the way, as an earlier term "free software" was thought to alienate companies.
- bruce511 2y ago
  Without wanting to be ageist here, I have an -impression- (which is hard to validate, or invalidate) that it's very much an "age" thing. There's one cohort that grew up in the 80's and 90's, and so "were around" at the dawn of the FS / OSS movements. We saw the evolution of Linux, Windows, MacOS from the beginning, and understood the fundamentals. A later cohort has grown up in a world where all these things are mature, and phrases like "Open Source" are less clearly understood. They may not understand what the term actually means, and may use it incorrectly (and more importantly the community around them uses it incorrectly) and so the incorrect version seems to "be the right meaning". It can be confusing when the term you think means one thing, ends up meaning something quite different. In the way that a lot of people see "Free Software" and assume that's free as-in price, not Free as in restricting-people-from-users-accessing-source-code. Even those well versed in Free Software don't necessarily understand the "users" part of that sentence. In the same way "Open" means different things to different people, and that may or may not match up with the -actual- meaning of the term Open Source.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Yep. I sort of straddle those two generations. I wasn't "around at the dawn", but it was contemporary history that was still very fresh. But a bit after me came the github generation with its huge boom of non-ideologically source-available-and-contributions-welcome code. So with that context, my take is that while I'm very sympathetic to wanting a short and pithy description, I do think that the chosen terminology really does fail to intuitively encode the full intended definition, and that's on the definers.
    - bruce511 2y ago
      >> that's on the definers. Is it though? What about farming? Does each farmer get to decide what "organic" means? Does every shoe manufacturer get to decide what "Ethically Sourced" stands for? I'm not so comfortable with the argument that "well, it means whatever the hearer wants it to mean, and if they get it wrong that's because it was defined badly?" I don't think "Free Software" is a terribly intuitive term (and never has been.) If anything the intuition seems completely tangential to it's actual meaning. But if you choose a FSF License, then you are releasing code under that license. "Open Source" is a somewhat better name - but again open to misinterpretation. "Open" to whom? Everyone? But for a -company- (and make no mistake, we're talking about -companies- altering the "popular meaning") to change the meaning so that it dilutes the actual meaning, and makes companies more powerful, I feel is not ok. In that context Open Source means something. Whatever they "intuit".
- lloeki 2y ago
  We can bicker on semantics all day long, if people at large continue using "open source" to mean "the source is openly visible" ("public source"?) we can't do much about it, and by irately pointing the discrepancy out we only come out as pedantic† to the point of appearing as "well, ackshually..." adversarial, which ends up being entirely counterproductive. Language evolves, semantics shift, context matters. What matters in practice is: a) whether we can disambiguate between "public source" and "one-true-scotsman FOSS". b) whether they're doing it in earnest (it's still better to have visible source than no source access at all) or whether the usage is disingenuous (trying to intentionally mislead by piggybacking on "aura" benefits of FOSS without it being actually FSF/OSI/SPDX/whathaveyou FOSS). At the end of the day, in practice one is still going to look at the actual license file/SPDX code anyway. † "Technically correct, the best kind of correct."
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    The problem is that companies like Microsoft created licenses that are semi-open to attract kudos. If the FOSS community changed “open” with “public” then Microsoft et al will then just move onto calling things like Reference Source License a “public source” license as well. The only way around this problem is to play these organisations at their own game and trade mark any such public source term. But that’s going to be expensive to enforce, and who’s going to want to pay for the lawyers?
    - klez 2y ago
      > The only way around this problem is to play these organisations at their own game and trade mark any such public source term. But that’s going to be expensive to enforce, and who’s going to want to pay for the lawyers? Well, that's what the FSF and OSI are for.
      - hnlmorg 2y ago
        Their funds aren’t limitless. They don’t even have the resources to fight a GPL violations. Never mind any new hypothetical responsibilities.
    - 2y ago
hnlmorg 2y ago
It’s only confusing because companies like Microsoft intentionally abuse the term “open”. I don’t really know what can be done about either. Because if the FOSS movement rally around a new term, you’ll then just see businesses who aren’t $OPEN_SYNONYM abuse that new term too just as they have with “open”. Blaming the confusion on the FOSS community isn’t fair when the blame lays squarely at those who do intentionally misuse it.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > It’s only confusing because companies like Microsoft intentionally abuse the term “open”. Not only, but perhaps indeed also. "Open source" reads as two separate words rather than a multi-word expression. The "open" sounds like as in a book, a shop, a museum: there's no implication of being able to do more than merely look unless you pay. There's also "open" in the sense of the open/closed principle in e.g. SOLID, but even as a developer that's not the first thing I think of. This is the exact other half of what seems to annoy people here about LLMs being called "open source" when they can be freely modified into derivative works but the training set is unknown: "open" yes in this sense, "source" no.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    The LLM weight dumps we see tend to fail the "open" part too, with fine print clauses saying things like non-commercial use only.
exe34 2y ago
> If you'd never had the whole open software vs. free software debate, how does one go through life as a software person and miss out on that formative experience? it's like saying you never heard of vegans.

klez 2y ago

The term "open source" has had a precise meaning in software since at least 1998. It's only recently that people have started bickering about it being confusing. Exactly when these "source available" clauses started popping up more frequently and people started noticing that some of the previous open source business models are not compatible with a SaaS world.

lifthrasiir 2y ago
To be clear, only claimed exactly so by open source (and not free software or general F/OSS) proponents. The term was also applied to non-software licenses with related but substantially different meanings.
- ensignavenger 2y ago
  There was no significant use of the term "open source" applying to software prior to the OSI. Contrast that with Free Software, which was a term in common use before the FSF. The idea that "Free Software" is a more precisely defined concept that Open Source is simply not true.
  - lifthrasiir 2y ago
    > Contrast that with Free Software, which was a term in common use before the FSF. I believe a term "freeware" was much better known even back then. Also, I do think "free software" is also a badly chosen term for a different reason. But we are only talking about the term "open source", so... "Open source" is a badly chosen term because it gives too much weight to the adjective "open". There is no inherent notion of "openness" about source code, so people would instead imagine something that is related to source code but can be thought to be "open". That's why "open" source was heavily associated with "open" governance even though the definition speaks nothing about governance. This confusion is pretty much intentional by the way, as an earlier term "free software" was thought to alienate companies.
bruce511 2y ago
Without wanting to be ageist here, I have an -impression- (which is hard to validate, or invalidate) that it's very much an "age" thing. There's one cohort that grew up in the 80's and 90's, and so "were around" at the dawn of the FS / OSS movements. We saw the evolution of Linux, Windows, MacOS from the beginning, and understood the fundamentals. A later cohort has grown up in a world where all these things are mature, and phrases like "Open Source" are less clearly understood. They may not understand what the term actually means, and may use it incorrectly (and more importantly the community around them uses it incorrectly) and so the incorrect version seems to "be the right meaning". It can be confusing when the term you think means one thing, ends up meaning something quite different. In the way that a lot of people see "Free Software" and assume that's free as-in price, not Free as in restricting-people-from-users-accessing-source-code. Even those well versed in Free Software don't necessarily understand the "users" part of that sentence. In the same way "Open" means different things to different people, and that may or may not match up with the -actual- meaning of the term Open Source.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Yep. I sort of straddle those two generations. I wasn't "around at the dawn", but it was contemporary history that was still very fresh. But a bit after me came the github generation with its huge boom of non-ideologically source-available-and-contributions-welcome code. So with that context, my take is that while I'm very sympathetic to wanting a short and pithy description, I do think that the chosen terminology really does fail to intuitively encode the full intended definition, and that's on the definers.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    >> that's on the definers. Is it though? What about farming? Does each farmer get to decide what "organic" means? Does every shoe manufacturer get to decide what "Ethically Sourced" stands for? I'm not so comfortable with the argument that "well, it means whatever the hearer wants it to mean, and if they get it wrong that's because it was defined badly?" I don't think "Free Software" is a terribly intuitive term (and never has been.) If anything the intuition seems completely tangential to it's actual meaning. But if you choose a FSF License, then you are releasing code under that license. "Open Source" is a somewhat better name - but again open to misinterpretation. "Open" to whom? Everyone? But for a -company- (and make no mistake, we're talking about -companies- altering the "popular meaning") to change the meaning so that it dilutes the actual meaning, and makes companies more powerful, I feel is not ok. In that context Open Source means something. Whatever they "intuit".
lloeki 2y ago
We can bicker on semantics all day long, if people at large continue using "open source" to mean "the source is openly visible" ("public source"?) we can't do much about it, and by irately pointing the discrepancy out we only come out as pedantic† to the point of appearing as "well, ackshually..." adversarial, which ends up being entirely counterproductive. Language evolves, semantics shift, context matters. What matters in practice is: a) whether we can disambiguate between "public source" and "one-true-scotsman FOSS". b) whether they're doing it in earnest (it's still better to have visible source than no source access at all) or whether the usage is disingenuous (trying to intentionally mislead by piggybacking on "aura" benefits of FOSS without it being actually FSF/OSI/SPDX/whathaveyou FOSS). At the end of the day, in practice one is still going to look at the actual license file/SPDX code anyway. † "Technically correct, the best kind of correct."
- hnlmorg 2y ago
  The problem is that companies like Microsoft created licenses that are semi-open to attract kudos. If the FOSS community changed “open” with “public” then Microsoft et al will then just move onto calling things like Reference Source License a “public source” license as well. The only way around this problem is to play these organisations at their own game and trade mark any such public source term. But that’s going to be expensive to enforce, and who’s going to want to pay for the lawyers?
  - klez 2y ago
    > The only way around this problem is to play these organisations at their own game and trade mark any such public source term. But that’s going to be expensive to enforce, and who’s going to want to pay for the lawyers? Well, that's what the FSF and OSI are for.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      Their funds aren’t limitless. They don’t even have the resources to fight a GPL violations. Never mind any new hypothetical responsibilities.
  - 2y ago

hnlmorg 2y ago

It’s only confusing because companies like Microsoft intentionally abuse the term “open”. I don’t really know what can be done about either. Because if the FOSS movement rally around a new term, you’ll then just see businesses who aren’t $OPEN_SYNONYM abuse that new term too just as they have with “open”. Blaming the confusion on the FOSS community isn’t fair when the blame lays squarely at those who do intentionally misuse it.

ben_w 2y ago
> It’s only confusing because companies like Microsoft intentionally abuse the term “open”. Not only, but perhaps indeed also. "Open source" reads as two separate words rather than a multi-word expression. The "open" sounds like as in a book, a shop, a museum: there's no implication of being able to do more than merely look unless you pay. There's also "open" in the sense of the open/closed principle in e.g. SOLID, but even as a developer that's not the first thing I think of. This is the exact other half of what seems to annoy people here about LLMs being called "open source" when they can be freely modified into derivative works but the training set is unknown: "open" yes in this sense, "source" no.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  The LLM weight dumps we see tend to fail the "open" part too, with fine print clauses saying things like non-commercial use only.

exe34 2y ago

> If you'd never had the whole open software vs. free software debate, how does one go through life as a software person and miss out on that formative experience? it's like saying you never heard of vegans.