Edit: After reading the applicable sections of the trial court ruling, it is no different - the court simply accepted the plantiff and defendant's shared use of the term. It didn't reference OCI or FSF or any other authority.
Absolutely they should control the term. Just look at all of the companies out there with "source-available" licenses masquerading as Open Source. Neo4j themselves here uses "Open Source" in all of their marketing materials and should be just as guilty as this fork of false advertising.
Not sure who else would be better.
2. There are organizations other than OSI which have their own opinions on what they consider a “valid” open source license.
3. Some licenses are functionally open source but not approved by OSI because of their limited use. Furthermore, public domain works aren’t licensed at all.
4. OSI has no trademark on “open source”.
OSI’s opinion is only as good as other people agree with it.
What other organizations have credible claims?
I’ve only heard of companies that have created non-open licenses and are trying to redefine the term (eg, open core, etc)
Personally, when Subway calls their sandwiches "good", I think they are actually making non-good sandwiches, and they're trying to redefine the term.
Both "good" and "open source" are descriptive terms that are subjective. The OSI recognizes this themselves:
> "Open Source" is not and cannot become a trademark.
> there is virtually no chance that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would register the mark "open source"; the mark is too descriptive
https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...
Credible to me, but I don’t get to decide what’s credible. We live in a society, etc etc. that’s why I asked.
Subway can’t call the cold cut combo sandwich a fried chicken sandwich even though I think they are a credible organization. They would be wrong. If there’s some other org that is credible and is credible using open source, I’d like to know.
Just like Subway would not be credible if they claimed their non-organic sandwich was organic.
The examples I’m familiar with are companies trying to benefit from open source as a positive marketing term and I don’t think are credible.
OSI might vehemently argue against people using “open source” to describe source available works, but… people do it. Someone does it in every comment section discussing this topic. People post their source code on GitHub without a license and call it open source. For several decades before the OSI was founded, the phrase “open source intelligence” was used to describe works that were public available, not those that were licensed in any particular way. It is, factually, not uncommon for people to use it differently than the OSI prescribes.
The fact that people have a disagreement on the use of the term is exactly why people have leeway in the use of the term.
To use food as an example, there are a ton of foods that are culinarily labeled “incorrectly”. The reason why they are legal to sell is because people used the words that way.
If you want to use “fried” as an example: consider refried beans. They are often not even fried once!
https://wearenotfoodies.com/culinary-misnomers-or-danish-pas...
“Organic” is a different story, it’s regulated in many places.
Their attempt to occupy the term is a little offensive.
Correction: They came up with the name, so it's theirs. I'll leave my public embarrassment here.
OS came to us from the OSD, written by the OSI and after hot debate in the early days of what should and shouldn't be Free Software. It was specifically a reaction to the FSF and a rejection of that group's activism, which didn't fit what they were trying to do.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software (specifically the first section starting with End of the 90s)
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/who-really-coined-the-term-op...
Digging further is for extreme nitpickers.
Gutenberg didn't "invent" the printing press either. Movable type dates back to 11th century China if you really want accurate attribution. Except for the purposes of the history of the modern world, Gutenberg's invention is most relevant/accurate.
My internet usage started on university systems back in the 80s, along with BBS and usenet and I had never heard the term Open Source even once until 1998.
General awareness of the term and its meaning starts with the OSI.
I don't imagine the F/OSS ecosystem would be much different today had the OSD/OSI never come to be, unlike say the Apache Foundation or GNU projects.
Still, it could matter it it ever came down to legal proceedings. But in everyday, colloquial terms, I think the OSD just "is" the definition of Open Source.
Edit: Yeah, see @CogitoCogito's post for more on the "Open Source predates OSI" argument. The counter-argument, I suppose, is that they didn't "coin" the phrase in the strictest sense, but were possibly the first to rigorously define it and give it meaning within a specific context. Whether or not one accepts that argument, or a similar argument, is obviously open to debate.
They did not come up with the use of the word "open" in regard to computer software or standards. Any native or fluent English speaker could easily do that.
The term "open standard" was used in the 1980's. In the area of Unix, specifically, there existed The Open Group for Unix Systems (later called X/Open Company) and The Open Software Foundation. These two merged in 1996 to form The Open Group.
In the 1980's AT&T and Sun Microsystems collaborated on creating a standard GUI, and called it Open Look.
All these people were corporate cronies trying to create a monopolistic software ecosystem that they control; they used the word "open" insincerely: the obvious ingredient that was lacking was access to source code by anyone who isn't one of the oligarchs.
In that environment it was very easy for any random developer or user to come up with a lament along the lines "these Open This and Open That people have open standards and open systems and even software with the word Open in the name; the only ingredient missing is, oops, the actual open source code".
Debian and Red Hat have their own teams determining whether something is Open Source enough to allow into their distributions, and obviously the Free Software Foundation keeps their own list of licenses which they consider Free Software.
If these groups of people disagree on whether a particular license is Free/Open Source software, it's not going to be considered an Open Source license by everyone.
That's about it.
I mean this is just factually not true. They have no such right. They tried to trademark it, but failed because it's just a generic term.
I'm going to label my company Open Source because we're open about how we source the laptops we programmed the software on. They're MacBook Pros, and you're welcome.
Open Source is a pretty dumb term. Free Software is also a dumb term for other reasons. It's a pity.