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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

You have a lot to say here, but I'd like to respond to just this:

>I'd argue the definition of what is open source is up for debate

It's not up for debate. It hasn't been up for debate for years. There are two generally accepted definitions of FOSS (each addressing the F and OS respectively):

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

https://opensource.org/osd

No one disagrees with these who isn't trying to sow discontent in the open source community. Disagreeing with the OSD or FSD is akin to denying climate change.

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See https://medium.com/@michaeldehaan/going-with-the-commons-cla...

No discontent. Quite the opposite - providing some options for less things being open core while trying to earn a small amount on my work.

If people want to call that not meeting some definition, I'm ok with that, but ascribing malice to it seems a little harsh.

Publishing software with the Anti-Commons Clause is not malice. Claiming it's open source is.

> No one disagrees with these who isn't trying to sow discontent in the open source community.

No. Everybody who disagrees with these has been driven from your ideological bubble. "Open source" has become a general term that is part of the natural language; nobody has the right to demand everybody use their preferred definition. Many people who use the term will never have visited gnu.org or opensource.org. Many others will have, but will have concluded that the strictness of those definitions is silly. It seems quite reasonable to disagree with a definition of "open source" that makes it practically impossible to make a living off of your work. If you want to have a debate on the merits, fine, but running around telling people they're using English wrong because they disagree with you is just foolish.

No, it hasn't. This is a lie which serves the interests of those who would harm open source. This language is important. You can't take the argument of "every word means what I want it to". The burden is on you to be understood, and by misusing terminology like "open source" you are either ignorant or deceitful. I wouldn't expand the definition of decongestant to include adderall because the former sells better and I'm a pharmacy that needs to get rid of my stock.

You might disagree with the principles of the definition, or think that the definition isn't useful. But that doesn't make it any less of the definition. If you want to do something different, you need to call it something else or you are lying to people.

> You might disagree with the principles of the definition, or think that the definition isn't useful. But that doesn't make it any less of the definition. If you want to do something different, you need to call it something else or you are lying to people.

This argument can be applied to your definition just as well as it can to my definition. Which underlines the pointlessness of arguing over the definition of "open source", and therefore the pointlessness of telling somebody that their thing is "not open source".

If you follow your logic everything becomes void.

Not so. I'm just saying that it's valid to disagree on the definition of a thing, and that when that happens you need to have debate about the real underlying disagreement, rather than making a pointless and foolish declaration of your correctness by your definition.

Although I'm not sure why I bothered typing that, given the current readings I'm getting on my troll detector.

Thanks so much. I've had this conversation with a lot of founders and we all feel we are in a race to the bottom of sorts where the power dynamic is all with the big corps.

We don't like open core but proprietary software is the best way to make money, so I'm trying to push that just a tiny amount.

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