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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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