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If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. That means being more careful to "edit out swipes", as the guidelines put it.
> "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "who is to be master - that's all."
- Through the Looking-Glass, slightly adjusted.
The whole goal of calling it "open source" is to take advantage of the positive connotations associated with the term. But the positive connotations come from software published under the dogma, and are inseparable from it.
(You can see the same twists and turns in Elastic's FAQ, where they desperately try to twist language so that "open" and "source" are as close together as possible without outright making contact. Guess nobody told them they can just use the word under their own definition, or as the rest of the world calls it, "lie".)
Outside of HN, most people I know refer to Elasticsearch as open source.
Either way, this is one of those age old debates about descriptive vs prescriptive language that will have absolutely no impact whatsoever. People will continue to post things they call open source that you disagree are open source, and you will continue to moan about it.
Language evolves.
The orthodox view on open source is a useful and broadly understood shorthand for a certain enumeration of rights, the withholding of those rights disproportionately serves a certain group of interests at the expense of others, and disregarding these problems and using the terminology incorrectly in spite of them is willfully dishonest.
Just because pepsi tastes like coca cola, doesn't make it coca cola.
Open source/free software places no restrictions on use/modification/distribution, end of story. With the sole exception of copyleft, which disallows you to distribute & withhold source, i.e. stopping you from depriving others of the very freedom that you benefitted from.
This places restrictions on use. Ergo it is not open source. Attempting to muddy the waters by using hand-wavey "you get most of your freedom!" type talk just muddies the waters and is precisely why the term got trademarked and why a definition exists. And it really is not hard to understand.
Your argument is roughly equivalent to this one: "I can call this random cereal Cheerios, because language evolves and neither you nor General Mills decides how people use language."
“Cheerios” is a made-up product name, and without knowing the definition of it, one couldn’t tell what it means. (I had to look it up, in fact.) In contrast, “open” and “source” are generic words, and in combination they can be used and understood without knowing any of the FOSS history.
That’s actually how I was introduced to the term: I always understood “open source” to just literally mean “the source code is openly accessible” – no more, no less. Even after having learned about the FOSS aspect later on, I continued to interpret “open source” in that literal sense.
Since this debate is a bit … heated, let me add that I’m not interested in making any general claims with my statement – I’m rather sharing my own perception to contribute a data point to how language can be used and understood differently, depending on where people come from.
“Open source” can be legitimately used as generic term, and as such one doesn’t need any definition at all to use the term in its colloquial sense.
Imagine someone were to arbitrarily define the term “free lunch” to mean something very specific, instead of the naive interpretation of “a meal at noon that you don’t have to pay for”. Only because they’d claim and publish their definition doesn’t make it universal from then on, regardless of whether the combination of those words had been used somewhere else before.
If you think of patent law, for example, it’s not for nothing that you can’t claim a trademark on generic terms. The reasoning behind that stems from the very same problem.
I agree with you that it probably would have been better if the FOSS movement had established a more specific term for what they meant. (Like: “FOSS”, for example.) But – to put it bluntly – that’s a home-made problem on behalf of the FOSS movement, and not mine.
Nobody used the term "open source" before it was deliberately invented. There was plenty of software in the 80s and 90s that we could retroactively call "open source," but nobody used that phrase at the time. The phrase "open source" was specifically created in 1998 because the term then in common use, "free software," was too generic and people were confused about what it meant. So a new term was created for the express purpose to have a term with no prior meaning so that a specific meaning could be assigned to it.
You seem to think that because "open source" is a phrase you see a lot, it's a generic phrase that was always used informally and grew out of natural language. But that's not the case. It's a term of art that was artificially created with a specific meaning.
[0] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/google_retains_its_t...
I then mentioned loss of trademark protection to further evidence that such words change meaning.