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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Different people have different meanings for "open". Right now there seems to be something of a crisis of terminology, where "open source" originally just meant "the source is available". The the OSI stepped in and gave it a specific definition with the OSD, but some people still continue to use it in the original "source is available"-way, whereas others use it only to mean OSD-compatible or OSI-approved.

I'm not sure if inventing more terms will be successful or useful, so the only way forward I see is to relax and assume good intent from everyone, use "OSI-approved" or "compatible with OSD", and "open source" as a very broad umbrella term for anything where the source is available. This is already how many people use the term, especially those not intimately familiar with software dev/open source. I've never seen a single instance where telling people that "you're technically using that commonly used term wrong" is successful.

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The central thesis of your comment, which also mirrors an oblique side remark from the article, is a total fabrication.

OSI did not commandeer the phrase "open source". OSI coined "open source".

But the English language already had definitions for "open" and "source".

English-speakers combining those two to produce the intuitive way ("you can see the source code") gives us our present situation.

Regardless of how valid anyone sees your "but", it's not the extent of claim made in the comment I replied to.

Both the comment and the article make a very specific claim about the term "open source": the (frequently encountered) falsehood that the term "open source" preceded OSI, and that the OSI made it their prerogative to wrench it from the mouths (keyboards) of programmers so as to suit the OSI's desires. Not only is that not true, it doesn't seem to be accompanied by any appreciation of the irony involved here, considering that the exact opposite thing is what's actually going on—by the folks who are complaining about retconning language!

"Open" was a high-froth marketing term in computing long before OSI came around. "Open source" itself was and is commonly used in intelligence.

Christine Patterson, who proposed "open source" at the freeware summit, has written that she mentioned it to a friend in marketing at the time, and the friend advised against. "Open" was too played out, meant everything and nothing.

This sounds like a retort to OSI's "open source", but it isn't. It contradicts nothing and does much less to support the "other" side than it seems to.

How many times are the goalposts going to move in this conversation?

> Christine Patterson

Peterson.

Thanks for the typo correction.

On "open", see:

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

https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

"Open" wasn't greenfield. "Open" was a marketing buzzword in computing all through the eighties.

> This sounds like a retort to OSI's "open source", but it isn't.

That's not an argument, it's a naked conclusion about an argument.

If you'd like to send a counter-argument, I'd be happy to read it. If you'd prefer to play referee, I've no interest.

Here's a breakdown of this particular bait-and-switch:

The first, strong-but-indefensible claim is made—the one that argues "open source" was in play and that there was some "original" meaning that predates OSI and their attempt to co-opt the term.

This is disputed.

We then see a retreat from out of the bailey into the motte, where we appeal to the "intuitive" understanding (presumably first mover now doesn't matter). Later we're back somewhere in between, except this time musing that perhaps "open" didn't mean anything at the time the Foresight group decided to embroider "open source" on their crest.

In summary, the only thing we've seen is a bad argument that was subsequently vacated, leaving a void in its place plus nothing more substantial than vague suggestions that some other arguments exist that can quash OSI's stake in the term "open source".

So you'll have to forgive me if I haven't yet responded with a counter-argument that requires guessing what claims your mercurial stance is going to have you calling for me to take down next without you actually going through the effort of arguing them in the first place—and thus pinning them down into a form that can actually be squared. Are you able to commit to laying out what you actually believe here and your rationale for why it's valid line of thought?

In other words, if you want to hear a counter argument, you're going to first need to articulate the initial argument that you expect to be countered—preferably in the form of complete sentences that can be read as a deductive play-by-play, each point following from the last, rather than non-sequiturs appealing to incompatible values and adhering to no common goal besides opposition to OSI.

Usage examples of "Open Source" from 1993 and 1996:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.ms-windows.pro...

http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/fall96/0269.html

Especially that Caldera announcement for OpenDOS seems fairly high-profile.

I'm not suggesting that Christine Peterson is lying when she claims to have coined "Open Source"; it could be coined independently on several occasions, or perhaps she had seen the term but merely forgot about it.

Even if OSI would have coined the term, that still wouldn't mean they should be in 100% control of all usage of it. That's not how language works.

Not exactly, it was used before that as well, I don't have time to find references for this right now as it's Dec 31st and I'm going out in a bit, but will update the article with them later.

"Open source" probably got coined/invented multiple times independently, which is not surprising since "open" was very common as well, or perhaps the OSI folks simply forgot they heard it before (human memory is not very good).

The quip "human memory is not very good" is the most accurate part of this comment.

People also misuse the term "public domain" to refer to a wide variety of things that mostly amount to "I found it somewhere and I want to use it". That doesn't make it correct.

There's a difference between an unintentional mistake of loose terminology, and someone intentionally trying to create confusion and FUD for their own benefit. In the former case, I've run into multiple people who did appreciate learning what "open source" actually means. (I'm in a position of providing mentorship on a variety of topics, including on FOSS.) In the latter case, anyone trying to misleadingly brand their software as open while using a license that isn't actually open needs a strong response; the companies engaging in such misleading practices are unlikely to listen to that response themselves, but many of their customers and potential users will listen, and steer clear.

We don't need to invent new terms. We have terms. We need to discourage misuse of the terms we have. If (hypothetically) we invented a new term and that term caught on, then people would try to abuse that term. There's an incentive to latch onto the popular terminology while attempting to work around its requirements; there needs to be a strong disincentive to doing so, as well.

When a large number of people use a word to mean something, that's what the word means. My definition of "public domain" doesn't trump their definition, just because I'm a lawyer or a programmer or somehow more specific. Neither does James Boyle's or Larry Lessig's.

The first group to latch onto "open source" was OSI. "Open" had been a buzzword in computing for a whole generation before.

The media didn't eat up ESR's line because OSI had a definition or a license list. Initially, it had neither. The media ate it up because of the software, which hadn't been called by that name before.

Nobody's abusing anything here but OSI's sense of entitlement. Comment above is right: there's no exclusive right to the term.

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