Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

This is really great! I wish they wouldn't call it "open source", though. It looks like a source-available license:

https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/VVVVVV/blob/master/LICENSE....

If Terry is reading this, please correct your article. The correct terminology is important! Open source is defined by the OSD, which this license doesn't qualify for:

https://opensource.org/osd

Kudos for releasing your game's source, though!

Edit: I sent Terry an email and he agreed to change it <3 Thank you!

Edit 2: Ethan Lee worked on this! Ethan Lee is an awesome person. Ethan is probably the single biggest contributor to gaming on Linux, and he's always worked in the background. Thanks Ethan, you rock, and deserve more credit.

View on HN

Thank you for doing this.

Could a mod please change the HN title to match the new article title?

Sure!

p.s. I asked Drew to post another version of his comment praising Ethan, so we could move the replies to that bit to another subthread which isn't so offtopic. He did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22014064.

> Open source is defined by the OSD, which this license doesn't qualify for

The OSD isn't an arbiter of what is and isn't. Open-source is a flexible term, and insisting that projects must meet definitions A, B, and C is just going to fragment the community and exclude people.

The point of insisting what "open source" means is that we want to ensure the freedoms that open source guarantees. If we don't insist on this definition people will start pushing licenses that forbid commercial use and other things, as this license forbids, and we'll embrace it because we think "ah, open source!"

And yes, when you coin a term, you also get to say what that term means. That's the whole point of coining it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012429

The freedoms are guaranteed by the language of the license itself. That's what licenses are for.

You're arguing about linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Is the definition of the term what the coiner says, or is it how it is commonly understood?

A lot of people are going to disagree with you if you claim that prescriptivism is somehow more correct.

It is different for technical terms. It's perfectly fine if I told a novice mathematician, "no, wait, that's wrong, a Riemannian manifold is..."

We have a precise, technical definition of open source precisely so we can judge when a license satisfies the legal freedoms that open source demands.

Perhaps, but "open source" isn't a technical term, and anyway there are lots of vaguely technical terms that have a subtly different layman's definition anyway.

Categorizing certain phrases as "technical terms" to which different rules apply is just another form of linguistic prescriptivism, after all.

"Open source" is very much a technical term with a very precise definition.

Microsoft knew this when they wanted to jump on the bandwagon and named their own license "Shared Source Initiative" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative). It wasn't open source, it was "Shared Source", because it didn't comply with the definition of open source.

"Open Source" specifically was coined precisely because there was little or no documented previous use of the term. They wanted something that would mean roughly the same as "Free Software" but possible to protect with a trademark and owned by an industry association. (Not the FSF.)

I'm very curious how many of those insisting on the strict definition also pronounce .gif as GIFF, despite the creator clearly insisting it's JIFF.

Words change. The coiner has no more real authority over them than anyone else.

To be fair I see a fundamental difference between changing a words pronunciation and meaning.

That's true enough.

Related, the definition of gif has actually changed for some. Instead of a specific file format they use the term to mean "soundless looping video". Admittedly even I have a hard time swallowing that definition.

Seems more like calling a JPEG a GIF.

> Open source is defined by the OSD

To be a bit pedantic, your statement is a slightly ambiguous.

They have a good/accurate definition of open source. They don't "define it" in that they can change the definition to mean "and the packaging must be blue" and that becomes part of what open source means.

Yes, OSI is responsible for the OSD, but the term has gotten somewhat "genericised". It's like saying that the Kimberly-Clark company doesn't define what "kleenex" is anymore.

Whenever this debates comes up everyone always says, "wait, the term existed before OSI", but no, it really did not. Essentially nobody was saying "open source" before 1998 when OSI and Tim O'Reilly started pushing "open source".

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler

"Open source" wasn't our idea, and the greatest marketing trick that OSI ever did was convince so many of us that it was.

Not kleenex, no, but open source as a term exists in the same way that escalator does. If the OSI was to change their definition, they would be wrong. The definition has transcended them. I honestly have a hard time understanding how people don't agree with that.

OSI got bad legal advice and quickly abandoned the trademark of the term "open source" itself.

https://trademark.trademarkia.com/open-source-75439502.html

Bruce Perens regrets this[1]. But they could have. The term was not generic when they coined it. It really is like "kleenex".

----

[1] private communication

But due to how trademarks work, they would have had to then aggressively protect that trademark with lawyers and stuff and I have a hard time imagining that working out all that well with a lot of us open source software enthusiasts and companies.

Simply put, I think if the name “open source” was a trademark, the open source community would still exist, and businesses would produce open source software as they do today too, but a lot of us would be using some other name for this instead of referring to it as “open source”, so that we’d avoid any potential problems with the trademark of open source.

It wouldn't be such a big deal. As the current situation with VVVVV shows, we already kind of have our own little informal community-driven "trademark enforcement", and it works.

I used escalator specifically because a lot of people don't realize it originated as a trademarked term for the Otis Elevator Company's moving staircase. Kleenex is still well known as a brand name for tissues, even if it is used generically.

Well, there are references of "Open source" being in use earlier; for example:

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

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

Especially that Caldera one seems pretty high profile.

"Open source" has always been used as a generic term, because it's a very descriptive adjective+noun one. Trying to reserve such terms for one particular narrow usage seems like an fools' errand to me, which is why these discussion are being held all the time.

The Caldera one is always "open source-code", not "open-source code". The words happen to appear together but aren't being used with the same intent.

I didn't know about the NT example. It's a new one to me. But it's also very isolated. I said "essentially nobody" not absolutely "no one". There are a few scattered and rare examples before 1998, but it was not common parlance and most people had never heard about "open source" before Tim O'Reilly bankrolled OSI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com