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