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Comment by nybble41 | Hacker News Reader

What does this even have to do with Open Source? MongoDB isn't Open Source; not any more. Their new Server Side Public License is not an OSI-approved Open Source license, and the intent of the license change goes directly against the 6th criteria of the Open Source Definition ("No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor").

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While I agree with what you said it is important to note that the OSI isn't the defining authority on what is to be considered open source.

I keep seeing this sentence (or variations thereof) on every thread about this topic.

It sounds weird to me that people think a foundation created by Perens and Raymond (et al.), the people who defined Open Source, and wrote the Open Source Definition is not the defining authority on what open source is.

What gives?

I think the idea there is that one body shouldn't have a proprietary lock on what counts as Open Source and what doesn't. OSI/OSD as the loudest voices of what is OSS, is helpful, but they shouldn't be the only voices.

(As much as I get annoyed by things claiming to be open source, that really aren't proper open source, I have to accept that this is a movement brought about by a rag-tag bunch of hackers who don't much care for single entities telling them what to do, so they should also be measured by that)

It was a movement brought by an organized group of professionals who thought that the viral nature of the GPL kept business from taking advantage of the new commons. They created an organization to monitor use of the new term "Open Source," which would be a superset of the GPL, without the onerous-to-business requirement of sharing your changes.

The problem is assuming "open source" is a generic term. It's not. It's a term invented by OSI, so they get to define what it means.

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