Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

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> Tellingly, such redefinitions are generally broader than the accepted OSI definition, so as to include whatever product someone is trying to push.

I disagree. In fact I'll present the counter example of "myself". I don't agree with the OSIs definition of open source, I think it run contrary to the plain meaning of the term, and is contrary to pre-OSI use of the term. I've argued that numerous times on this forum (and I'm going to avoid repeating these arguments in depth here, just google "gpm Open Source site:news.ycombinator.com"/"gpm Open Source site:lobste.rs" and you will be able to find the arguments).

I have never pushed a product claiming to be open source that does not meet the OSIs definition, nor do I anticipate I ever will, since that seems to be a great way to make discussions about the product devolve into arguments about licensing, which is terrible advertising.

The fact that these arguments usually only come up when there is a reason to argue, i.e. someone has used the term in a way outside of the OSIs definition, does not mean that people only think the right definition of the term is something else when it's for their own benefit.

Frankly I don't get why OSI proponents are so angry about the use of the term Open Source, when they can just unambiguously use "OSI Approved License" instead.

It's borderline gatekeeping and it irks me to no end.

> It's borderline gatekeeping

No, it's a term-of-art. When people muddy the waters and try to undermine the standard terminology of a field, it's not some righteous struggle to liberate a term, it's just an obstacle to clear communication.

In aviation, flap is a precise term-of-art, and is never used interchangeably with aileron, despite that an aileron is plainly a kind of flap (in the colloquial sense). If you adopt your own definition of flap, to refer to both flaps and ailerons, no-one is going to sue you, but no-one is going to know what you're talking about. Your use of the term will be considered not merely different, but wrong.

Similarly, you could try telling a physicist that you consider the words power and force to be interchangeable. They're not going to sue you, but they're also not likely to entertain your deliberate misuse of standard terms.

Are pilots and physicists gatekeeping by being so insistent that you use their terms their way?

But it’s not a term of art, when it was first used it had a broad scope for more or less anything where source was made available to users of software.

The OSI definition is a newer more narrow definition adopted long after the term was in broad use.

And fundamentally, the literal meaning of the words open and source do not have connotations beyond the source being available for viewing.

Please cite this supposed earlier pre-OSI usage. Can you?

Apparently the OSI was founded February 1998, the same month the term open source was first coined [0][1]. The OSI says [2] The Open Source Definition was then created during the launch of the OSI in Feb. 1998 by revising the DFSG and removing Debian-specific references.

This seems to indicate that the OSI's precise definition was pretty much there from the beginning, unless they didn't really coin the term open source and it was floating around beforehand. I've heard from others that open source was in use before the OSI definition, so perhaps that's the case.

As I mention in my response though, I don't think the term's early history much matters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Origins

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso...

[2] https://opensource.org/history

You say you’ve heard that but you cannot find the proof, because if it was in use, it was only used occasionally. They coined the term and they gave it the definition.

> when it was first used it had a broad scope for more or less anything where source was made available to users

I'm not sure the early history of the term really matters. Presumably early aeronautical engineers and early physicists had to all agree on the terms of their field. It's fortunate that they did so, and now that their field is mature, their terms are clear and unambiguous.

Someone without an education in physics might not be able to intuit that physicists use the terms strength, hardness, and toughness in distinct and precise ways.

> The OSI definition is a newer more narrow definition adopted long after the term was in broad use.

I'd say it's a more considered, more precise, more meaningful definition.

> the literal meaning of the words open and source do not have connotations beyond the source being available for viewing

I already gave the example of flap, a precise term-of-art in aviation that reuses a non-technical English word in a way that cannot simply be intuited.

I also don't see that open needs to be a synonym of viewable. I think it's fine that open be used to refer to something broader, as in the Open University for instance. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University

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