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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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".

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[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.

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