Can anyone explain what's meant by "o" and "u" word? Googled, but found no explanation.
He refers to an "O" word later which is pretty clearly "organic", which actually reminds me of what I dislike about this essay: Sure, it would be great if our Howard Roark-style farmer could grow his own organic crop and slap an "organic" label on it to sell it to his handful of fans without having to deal with the Organic Trade Association, but that's not so good for me, as a customer buying food at the local supermarket. If just anyone could label their food "organic", then what are the odds that word would ever actually mean anything?
Likewise, I think it's all well and good that this clearly intelligent and responsible person should build a composting toilet, but if there were _no_ standards, what would stop a new neighbor from moving in next to me and installing, say, a toilet that dumps feces in a pile in the back yard?
Let's recast this. How you like to pay a third party an ongoing annual royalty for the privilege of calling your own software open source? We're smart enough to get concensus on a definition and, if necessary, back it with case law. We don't need interest groups co-opting words from the dictionary for their own financial interest.
I don't need the phrase anyway -- I call my work free software (which can't be trademarked), and describe it as GPL- or LGPL-licensed.
Whether something is open-source or not is pretty obvious; whether something is organic or not is difficult to verify and not generally well-understood yet.