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Comment by cycloptic | Hacker News Reader

I would agree with you if anyone was saying "hey the term open source doesn't mean anything and you can use it for whatever you want" but that's not what I've ever seen happening, and I doubt anyone wants that because it would make the term useless. What we actually do see is other groups trying to promote their own alternate definition of the term and trying to deny the OSI's usage, for equally arbitrary reasons. It's the same form of gatekeeping. Please just come up with another phrase, that's what the OSI did after all when they found the term "free software" to be inadequate.

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> Please just come up with another phrase, that's what the OSI did

I think a bit of a myth. There's documented existing use of the term in the same context before the OSI say they came up with it, and they were denied the trademark by the USPTO because it was an existing simply descriptive term.

I'm not saying they came up with the term before anyone in the world. While the term was used previously, it didn't have the concrete definition it does now. That's why they were able to do what they did.

You said 'just come up with another phrase' and that's what they didn't do - they took an existing phrase with a similar meaning, and started to tell everyone they were going to advocate a different meaning. And then tried to trademark it to steal it from the community!!

Sorry I didn't clarify -- They came up with a phrase that, while it existed, didn't have a concrete definition. To give an example, if someone right now wants to create "Source Available Initiative" or something like that I think that would conceptually be fine, even though the term is already in use, there is no organization that is clearly defining what it means. Does that explain it better? (Although I think creating more organizations like this is a terrible idea for other reasons, mostly having to do with license proliferation)

> "Source Available Initiative" or something like that I think that would conceptually be fine

I can understand that position but... they tried to trademark just 'open source' - without the 'initiative' part. They were told to rod off by the USPTO because you're not allowed to do that, so it's not ok by the law, whatever you think of it.

I wasn't speaking of the trademark, you don't need a trademark to publish and promote a public definition of a term. Misusing that term doesn't have legal consequences but it won't stop people from getting upset at you for misleading them, e.g. your customers getting miffed when they learn the "open source" option you provide actually means they can't do anything with the source at all that they would expect to be able to do with the popular Apache/MIT/GPL/BSD options. (Correct me if I'm mistaken, but just those 4 licenses seem to be used for the vast majority of open source now)

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