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Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

> The reference backend was only Open Source (not freely redistributable).

Free redistributibility is part of the Open Source Definition. It is literally the first item: https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

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I think they meant lower case "open source" (as in the source is open (anyone can read/compile it)). There are plenty of software that are open source but not freely distributable, such as Unreal Engine.

"open source", no matter the capitalization, means what the OSI has defined. Unreal Engine is neither Open Source nor open source. It is simply proprietary. To say otherwise is a practice known as "open washing" that companies use to appear community friendly when in fact they are not.

This. While OSI may not have been successful in getting an official trademark on the phrase "Open Source", in practice almost everybody treats "Open Source" or "open source" as meaning what the Open Source Definition states. Other "source available" approaches are more correctly termed "shared source" or something.

Since when does "open-source" mean "community-friendly"? Why insist on using words that don't say what you want them to mean, when you can use ones that do?

The usual term for that sort of arrangement would be "shared source".

I've seen "source-available" as well. But yes, it's not "open source" if it's proprietary source that you can only look at.

You can do a lot more than look at it. You can modify it, compile it, share your modifications, and share your binaries with your game.

The one major thing you can't do is redistribute the base source code. That's a big thing, and disqualifies it from being open source, but let's not pretend there is no value in the source code access.

The first time I said that on HN somewhere else I got quite a flak. I don't know when OSI's definition became mainstream. The first time I heard open source, it meant the same as what you said. Nowadays you have to use a different term for that.

Collins still has the old definition "free to use or modify". Merriam-Webster and Oxford has since included "redistribution" in the definition.

The term "shared source" is not in any dictionary though.

> I don't know when OSI's definition became mainstream. The first time I heard open source, it meant the same as what you said. Nowadays you have to use a different term for that.

The notion that the phrase "open source" started out with broader definition but was later revised by OSI is itself revisionism.

OSI's definition is important because the phrase "open source" originates with the folks behind OSI—the term did not exist before 1998 when they created it. The phrase resulted from a public awareness effort leading up to the release of the Mozilla code on March 31, because the only alternative that had legs at the time was the FSF's term "free software", which had marketability problems. A few months later, a bunch of those involved in the brainstorming session where "open source" was coined went on to start the OSI as an advocacy group primarily concerned with:

a) marketing the term "open source" to get the public to adopt it en masse

b) advocating for the adoption of open source ideals themselves

To sum up, there has never been a time when "open source" meant something besides how the OSI defined it, except for sloppy usage in instances of someone co-opting the OSI's term but not their definition for it.

(Disagree with whether it's a good definition or not, but telling history and facts wrong is something to be avoided.)

I wrote a blog post about that:

http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...

"Shared source" seems to originate from Microsoft, from the time period before it embraced OSS proper. At least the first time I've seen it in any context was the "shared source CLI", which was released under the look-but-do-not-touch license as a reference implementation to back the ECMA CLI and C# standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Language_...

That said, it's a surprisingly good term, because it's so accurate - the source is shared with you, but there isn't much you can do with it other than look at it.

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