Comment by keane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keane | Hacker News Reader

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Kyle McDonald discusses this:

"I imagine FaceOSC being used to prototype ideas surrounding face-based interaction. I created it because Jason Saragih, the researcher behind FaceTracker, uses an open source non-commercial license for his code. He asks that anyone who wants to use the code email him directly, as a way to keep track of the usage. This is great, but I know that one of the fastest ways to get cool stuff happening is to make new tools and research accessible to a wide audience. So I asked him if it would be ok to make a standalone app for people to prototype their ideas — even if they don't have access to the code. Everyone already 'speaks' OSC so I thought this would be the easiest way to get the technology out there. Eventually, if people need to integrate it into a single application, they can contact Jason directly and use my ofxFaceTracker addon to get started: https://github.com/kylemcdonald/ofxFaceTracker

And if they need to go the commercial route, there’s FaceAPI http://www.seeingmachines.com/product/faceapi/ "

Source: http://electronica.fm/news/110714/music-your-face-artist-kyl...

"Open source" and "non-commercial license" are mutually exclusive. See the Open Source Definition, which is the official definition of the term "open source" by the people who invented it, http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd, point 6, "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor," whose rationale is explained on http://www.opensource.org/osd.html: "The major intention of this clause is to prohibit license traps that prevent open source from being used commercially. We want commercial users to join our community, not feel excluded from it."

I really hate the hijacking of the term "open source" by the OSI. I think open source is a generic term that should mean what it says -- the source is open, i.e., accessible and modifiable. I don't think that the distribution limitations should go into it.

While I certainly appreciate all the open-source projects that allow commercial usage, I really think that a trend of projects using non-commercial or licensee-only licenses would do a lot of good, because as it stands I'd rather have the source code for every program I use even if I'm not allowed to share that code with someone who hasn't paid the original author.

I recognize that copyleft and all that is important and good, but I think we'd see much more source availability if people were less rabid about their demands for unlimited distribution. Unlimited distribution is rad but it greatly reduces the effective profitability of the product, and there's some software that just doesn't get made if it doesn't have some cash behind it.

> I really hate the hijacking of the term "open source" by the OSI.

The OSI was founded a couple of months after the invention of the term "open-source software", by the same people who invented the term. They aren't the ones who are "hijacking" it. You are. It's dishonest. Please stop doing it, and please stop attempting to rewrite history in order to justify your dishonest attempt to hijack the term. The people who read HN aren't so ignorant that you can fool them that way.

What's the correct term, in your opinion?

I've heard the term "shared source" used.

How about "The source code is available"?

Isn't this why we have the disambiguators gratis and libre? Or, if you prefer, “... as in beer” and “... as in speech.”

I don't think he cares he was clearly just trolling.

Are you really going to claim that no one has ever used the generic term "open source" prior to the folks in the OSI?

Yes, that is correct. No one, as far as I can tell, ever used the generic term "open source" (for software, not intelligence) prior to the folks in the OSI. There were a few cases you can find on Usenet of people saying "open source code", but that's not the same thing; "open" there modifies "code", rather than modifying "source".

You can read the history at http://www.opensource.org/history. I wasn't at the meeting, but I was part of the community for years before that, and I was part of the email exchange that followed that led up to the formation of the OSI. Although I'm no fan of ESR, I can attest that the OSI folks' claim to have invented the term is legitimate and correct.

You appear to be splitting hairs here. Most folks I know frequently say "source" as a shorthand for "source code". It's not a big leap to tack on "open" in front of that when you mean the source is available for inspection by those outside the person/company who developed it (i.e., not "closed").

If you want to claim that OSI popularized the phrase and imbued it with a very specific meaning, you'd probably have a point, but I don't see how they could lay claim to ownership of such a generic term. At the very least it seems out of bounds to be accusing someone of being "dishonest" about it and "rewriting history".

> It's not a big leap to tack on "open" in front of that when you mean the source is available for inspection by those outside the person/company who developed it (i.e., not "closed").

Yet digging through Usenet, web, and mailing-list archives has not, so far, found a single example of anyone making that leap prior to the 1998 meeting.

Well, the examples that have been found you have explained away by careful parsing of the language in such a way as to ignore them. Given your fervor on this particular subject I don't think there is evidence you would accept.

Here's another one: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.protocols.ibm/browse_thr...

Frankly, it really is just baffling to me that you are defending this so aggressively to the point of accusing others of outright dishonesty when discussing it. Do you really think that appropriate?

> Here's another one

That one is interesting. The most plausible interpretation is that it is actually a counterexample! He very likely means "source code" and not, say, "FTP site".

> Frankly, it really is just baffling to me that you are defending this so aggressively to the point of accusing others of outright dishonesty when discussing it. Do you really think that appropriate?

Yes. It's like "pro-choice" or like "organic farming": one group of people is using this term with a specific idiomatic meaning, and there are other people who want to associate themselves with that meaning in order to free-ride off the goodwill that comes with it, but without paying the price. An anti-abortion politician isn't "pro-choice" because they support school vouchers, an apricot sprayed with malathion isn't "organic" because it contains carbon compounds, and a free-for-noncommercial-use program isn't "open-source" because its source code isn't secret.

We're obviously going to just disagree on this one, but I do think it's unfortunate that you still feel the need to associate some ulterior motive to people who don't agree with you ("free-ride off the goodwill"). You adhere to a very specific definition of the phrase and there's nothing wrong with that. However, attacking others who do not is unnecessary as well as unhelpful for your cause.

> There were a few cases you can find on Usenet of people saying "open source code", but that's not the same thing; "open" there modifies "code", rather than modifying "source".

Ah, come on! You can't be serious.

"Source" in "Open Source" is short for "source code", and no other meaning of the word "source". The history page you link doesn't state it explicitly, but they do mention "source code" a few times, in addition to mentioning no other meaning of the word "source", so I think it's pretty reasonably to assume that these OSI people, like many programmers, when speaking about "source" were using it as a short for "source code".

Because really, a "source" (in the meaning of "origin") that is "open", what does that even mean? That things can flow from it? Sorry but you are also aware of the term "closed source" right? Except that, if nothing originates from it, it's no longer a source. Yet if you interpret it as "closed source code", it still makes sense.

I don't really see how your link to the opensource.org/history proves your point, either. In fact it strengthens the other point as well. Sure it shows they decided to name their new licensing scheme "Open Source" (where it seems to me, "Source", from the context to be short for "Source Code") -- even though people had (naturally) already been using the term "open" for source code that is publically available.

So you can make the point, that possibly, they were the first that shortened "open source code" to "open source" and using that as a brand, while at the same time hijacking the meaning to something much more strict (namely excluding of open non-commercial licenses).

See here for usages of "open source" prior to 1998, when OSI was founded: http://groups.google.com/groups/search?as_q=&as_epq=open...

You can see on the first page results from 94, 95, 96 all used to refer to "open source" code, i.e., a program whose source code was available to users. That's just the first page. The term had gained sufficient prevalence to be mentioned in a press release from 1996. There's only one hit on the first page (for me, at least) that refers to "open source" in another context ("unable to open source file").

That's just the first page, there are many more pages of hits.

That's not '"open source" code', that's 'open "source code"', and almost all the hits Google finds for "open source code" are duplicates of a single press release about Willows TWIN. The rest of the page (for me) is almost entirely about open-source intelligence, which has nothing at all to do with software or source code, but rather refers to reports that CIA and related agencies produce by reading public information like what's in the newspapers. That's what the Open Source Solutions 1994 conference was, for example.

You can save yourself the trouble of looking through the many more pages of hits. I've done it before.

The word "source" is short for "source code." They aren't exactly distinct things, so that is really splitting hairs. If we acknowledge that use of "open," then "open source" falls right out of it.

And there are lot of the dupes you're talking about, but if you filter those out in your search, you'll see that is not the only occurrence. Quickly sifting through, I found these:

From 1995 we have a guy asking for a "modeler with open source code."

1996 has Caldera advocating "an open-source code model" (it even has the hyphen in the right place!), as well as an essay about "Open Source Code and the Early Development of Unix." The former case is interesting because it explicitly defines open-source code as source code that is openly distributed, and clarifies that a small fee is required to sell derived products commercially. (So SCO actually claimed the term before OSI did!)

And 1997 has a discussion about whether "open source cryptography" is better than "proprietary … cryptography" (and in which "published" is used as a synonym for "open source").

So it appears that the term was much less common before OSI — but it was used to talk about source code you could read, long before they came along with their definition.

> "an open-source code model" (it even has the hyphen in the right place!)

I think in that case both "open-source" and "code" are modifying "model", so it's still not the same thing.

> And 1997 has a discussion about whether "open source cryptography" is better than "proprietary … cryptography" (and in which "published" is used as a synonym for "open source").

That's from the spook community, which uses "open source" to mean "publicly known information", and they're talking about cryptosystems, not source code.

> The word "source" is short for "source code." They aren't exactly distinct things, so that is really splitting hairs.

Someone could have potentially used the word "source" as short for "source code" in the phrase "open source" before Chris Peterson did in that meeting, but I haven't found any cases of that happening. Not a single one.

The whole point is that the phrase "open source" now has a specific meaning not derivable from the meanings of its component words, much like "source code", "pro-choice", or "death row". If a Congressperson declares that they're "pro-choice" but votes to amend the Constitution to prohibit abortion, or someone claimed that they were fulfilling their contractual obligation to provide you with "source code" by giving you the SKUs they use to order office supplies, you'd be justifiably angry at the deception. If you find a quote from someone in 1958 using the term "pro-free-choice" to mean "opposed to racial segregation", it does not make any less dishonest a hypothetical use of the term "pro-choice" with that meaning today.

      The word "source" is short for "source code."

No, the word "source" is short for "source", as in ...

      any thing or place from which something comes, 
      arises, or is obtained;

Like how sheet music is a source for learning to play new songs.

Who's hijacking the term now?

You are, because "source" in "open source" refers to "source code", "open source code".

It's not code that originates from a source that's "open" .. what does that even mean?

It means the source code is open to the public.

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