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Don’t call it “open source” unless you mean it
- warmfuzzykitten 14y agoBah, don't try to impose your standards on me. The only people who can afford to turn open source into a full-time job are those who don't have a job or whose job is to work on an open source project. Most open source projects will never find a community because they are lost in the crowd and marginally useful, at best. Even very large open source projects - remember Jelly? - can lose their communities when they prove to be dead ends or new, shiny things come along. That's life. If someone wants to just put their code out there for someone else to use or improve on, that's plenty. If it catches fire and gathers an active community, even better, but there's no sense and it's faintly ridiculous to try to pump up every little hobby project as the Next Big Thing.
- Lukeas14 14y agoDo you have a viable alternative name for projects that people just want to release without fully supporting them? Until then most people will keep calling them open source. The term open source has always had a vague meaning that has covered many different types of projects that the creator doesn't get paid for (ex. free as in beer vs. free as in speech). Instead of trying to change the word's definition you might be more effective in coming up with another "free as in X" phrase to denote a project whose creators plan to offer support.