It was open sourced, just under a non-commercial license.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
The BSD and MIT licenses
>Source code: The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.
Does this apply to Linux? Check.
>Derived works: The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
Does this apply to Linux? Check.
Please visit https://opensource.org/licenses/ to see all of the licenses that are generally agreed upon to be Open Source licenses.
It *IS* accurate to say that the program and source must be free to use for all purposes the recipient wants including commercial.
This was an involved conversation that was had during the 90's and yes, "no commercial reuse allowed" licenses are not -in fact- free licenses. I might be wrong but I have the impression they are not allowed on debian cds/dvds for that reason.
> If I use a piece of software that has been obtained under the GNU GPL, am I allowed to modify the original code into a new program, then distribute and sell that new program commercially? (#GPLCommercially)
> You are allowed to sell copies of the modified program commercially, but only under the terms of the GNU GPL. Thus, for instance, you must make the source code available to the users of the program as described in the GPL, and they must be allowed to redistribute and modify it as described in the GPL.
> These requirements are the condition for including the GPL-covered code you received in a program of your own.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLCommercially
Its a model not a program. So that definition can't possibly apply to it no matter the license.
This is the software licensing world's version of "a hotdog is not a sandwich"
It is also not data collected by an intelligence agency or law enforcement from public sources.
1. Intelligence community people, who have long understood the term “open source” to mean a source of intelligence which is not itself secret.
2. People who, without having ever looked it up, assume it means that the source code is available for reading. These people are simply ignorant, and should be using the term “source available” instead, since it means exactly that.
3. People who want to be able to use the “open source” term for their software to gain goodwill, but don’t want to actually give all of the freedoms it should guarantee. These people are dishonest shills who try to confuse the debate in order to get away with fraudulent labeling.
(Repost of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29332056)
Or is "open source" just a term for "free" as in beer software that doesn't actually give people all the freedoms it should guarantee? Because that's what the FSF thinks.
Different people have different ideas about what freedoms people "should" have. Nobody is being dishonest about software freedoms when the BSD-4-clause was written, CC0 or when they write licenses with 'no evil' or 'no nuclear proliferation' clauses.
No it isn’t. The OSI invented the term "Open Source” as applied to software, and they get to define its meaning as what they intended.
> Because that's what the FSF thinks.
No they don’t. The FSF completely accepts the OSI definition of the term “Open Source”: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
The freedoms that a license "should" convey is not a fact, it is an opinion. And there are more than a few valid and honest opinions that exist, even beyond the opinions of FSF/OSI/CC/UCB/USG/Apache/FAANG/whoever
I am saying the exact opposite: that more than one definition may be valid, because the English lexicon is both descriptive and additive.
The model is CC. Because models aren't code.
For the last 25 years, in the software field, the common usage has been the one from the OSI.
Of course contrarians will disagree. Contrarians will always be contrary and may be safely ignored.
This debate is beyond silly. It’s like arguing about what the rules of, say, Settlers of Catan is. The rules are the official rules which come with the box; anything else is house rules or custom rules, and cannot be used in something like an official tournament. When people say that “Settlers of Catan does this thing X”, and the official rules expressly says it does not do X, they are (knowingly or not) being misleading.
All of these claims are untrue. Here is an example of open source being used to describe software in 1996. OSI was founded in 1998.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180402143912/http://www.xent.c...
> This debate is beyond silly. It’s like arguing about what the rules of, say, Settlers of Catan
Commercial board games typically use trademark law to prevent others from changing their rules. Popular games which do not have legally protected names often do have multiple sets of rules defined by different people. e.g poker.
Interesting. The attendees of the meeting on February 3rd, 1998 certainly all seem to think that they at least independently re-invented the term, so the term can’t have been very common. The meeting was held two weeks after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code, and the announcement did not use the term.