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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure the title is the correct response. As in "stop making software licenses" is not the problem.

Clearly any business can license their software any way they like.

What caused the poster some confusion is that it was marketed as an "open source" product. Once he determined it was not an OSI approved license then that should be the end of it. It's not Open Source. period.

By all means call them out on that - lots of people and companies are not licensing experts, and need guidance. I've helped people with this in the past and encouraged them to change to actual Open Source licenses that are compatible with their goals, and the goals of their community.

If anything the real headline should be "stop calling your product open source when it doesn't have an open source license".

[To be clear - I produce commercial software under not-open-source licenses. I've got no objection to folk doing that. I even ship the source with the product, and accept contributions back. But I don't call it "open source" because it's not "Open Source". It's something, sure, but it's not Open Source.]

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I think your take is a much more levelheaded view of events than the authors.

I completely agree with you that we shouldn’t be restricting how people choose to license their code. And agree that the real issue is the marketing: ie people calling something “open source” when it’s actually “source available to read”.

I see quite a few organisations play this game, like Obsidian. I’ve seen highly skilled and intelligent engineers fall for the trap of calling Obsidian open source because they can inspect the code of the Electon app; forgetting that doesn’t actually grant them a license to do anything with the code.

Like yourself, I have no qualms if an organisation wants to build proprietary / for profit stuff. I understand that means they might not even want to share their code. But what I do object to is when those organisations then try to gain some open source “street cred” for something that is proprietary.

> I’ve seen highly skilled and intelligent engineers fall for the trap of calling Obsidian open source because they can inspect the code of the Electon app; forgetting that doesn’t actually grant them a license to do anything with the code.

That's because the terminology is pretty confusing, doubly so for ESL people. If you'd never had the whole open software vs. free software debate, it's easy to think that "open source" means "source code available", as this is pretty much in line with the direct reading of the phrase.

The term "open source" has had a precise meaning in software since at least 1998. It's only recently that people have started bickering about it being confusing. Exactly when these "source available" clauses started popping up more frequently and people started noticing that some of the previous open source business models are not compatible with a SaaS world.

Without wanting to be ageist here, I have an -impression- (which is hard to validate, or invalidate) that it's very much an "age" thing.

There's one cohort that grew up in the 80's and 90's, and so "were around" at the dawn of the FS / OSS movements. We saw the evolution of Linux, Windows, MacOS from the beginning, and understood the fundamentals.

A later cohort has grown up in a world where all these things are mature, and phrases like "Open Source" are less clearly understood. They may not understand what the term actually means, and may use it incorrectly (and more importantly the community around them uses it incorrectly) and so the incorrect version seems to "be the right meaning". It can be confusing when the term you think means one thing, ends up meaning something quite different.

In the way that a lot of people see "Free Software" and assume that's free as-in price, not Free as in restricting-people-from-users-accessing-source-code. Even those well versed in Free Software don't necessarily understand the "users" part of that sentence.

In the same way "Open" means different things to different people, and that may or may not match up with the -actual- meaning of the term Open Source.

Yep. I sort of straddle those two generations. I wasn't "around at the dawn", but it was contemporary history that was still very fresh. But a bit after me came the github generation with its huge boom of non-ideologically source-available-and-contributions-welcome code.

So with that context, my take is that while I'm very sympathetic to wanting a short and pithy description, I do think that the chosen terminology really does fail to intuitively encode the full intended definition, and that's on the definers.

>> that's on the definers.

Is it though? What about farming? Does each farmer get to decide what "organic" means? Does every shoe manufacturer get to decide what "Ethically Sourced" stands for? I'm not so comfortable with the argument that "well, it means whatever the hearer wants it to mean, and if they get it wrong that's because it was defined badly?"

I don't think "Free Software" is a terribly intuitive term (and never has been.) If anything the intuition seems completely tangential to it's actual meaning. But if you choose a FSF License, then you are releasing code under that license.

"Open Source" is a somewhat better name - but again open to misinterpretation. "Open" to whom? Everyone?

But for a -company- (and make no mistake, we're talking about -companies- altering the "popular meaning") to change the meaning so that it dilutes the actual meaning, and makes companies more powerful, I feel is not ok. In that context Open Source means something. Whatever they "intuit".

To answer one of your questions, yes, every shoe manufacturer *does* get to decide what "Ethically Sourced" means. "ethically sourced isn’t a coined label with a standard legal definition. There’s no official institution approving its use in consumer marketing. Because ethical sourcing isn’t a term from an institution with a specific set of standards, it can encompass a wide range of ethical considerations."

I mean, yes, I do think it's "on them", I do think it's reasonable to criticize the definers of jargon terms that confuse people due to mismatching with their plain reading of the terms...

I think your other examples are indeed examples of the same kind of issue. For instance, I would say that "organic" is a much worse offender due to it targeting a much larger audience than our computing jargon does. I don't know whether "ethically sourced" has a technical definition that is a good match for my intuition of what it means, but I wouldn't be shocked at all to discover that it does not.

But like I said, I'm sympathetic to the definers of these kinds of things. They want something that works as marketing, so they use plain words that people have positive associations with ("free", "open", "organic", "ethical"), but then those words are too vaguely defined for their purposes so they also attach further meaning to them. But then that results in this tension, where people naturally assume the words mean only what they mean, and some community of gatekeepers has to be vigilant to come in and set the record straight.

Notably, we don't do this sort of thing with medicines, for instance. There isn't a community of people who have to correct peoples' use of a descriptive plainly worded jargon term like "happy pills", they are instead referred to as SSRIs, which has no plain reading and thus no potential for confusion.

I agree that it isn't good for companies to take advantage of this plain reading / technical definition mismatch, but I also think it's inevitable when trying to have it both ways by using a plain-sounding term while attaching it to a technical definition.

To be clear, only claimed exactly so by open source (and not free software or general F/OSS) proponents. The term was also applied to non-software licenses with related but substantially different meanings.

There was no significant use of the term "open source" applying to software prior to the OSI. Contrast that with Free Software, which was a term in common use before the FSF. The idea that "Free Software" is a more precisely defined concept that Open Source is simply not true.

> Contrast that with Free Software, which was a term in common use before the FSF.

I believe a term "freeware" was much better known even back then. Also, I do think "free software" is also a badly chosen term for a different reason. But we are only talking about the term "open source", so...

"Open source" is a badly chosen term because it gives too much weight to the adjective "open". There is no inherent notion of "openness" about source code, so people would instead imagine something that is related to source code but can be thought to be "open". That's why "open" source was heavily associated with "open" governance even though the definition speaks nothing about governance. This confusion is pretty much intentional by the way, as an earlier term "free software" was thought to alienate companies.

We can bicker on semantics all day long, if people at large continue using "open source" to mean "the source is openly visible" ("public source"?) we can't do much about it, and by irately pointing the discrepancy out we only come out as pedantic† to the point of appearing as "well, ackshually..." adversarial, which ends up being entirely counterproductive.

Language evolves, semantics shift, context matters.

What matters in practice is:

a) whether we can disambiguate between "public source" and "one-true-scotsman FOSS".

b) whether they're doing it in earnest (it's still better to have visible source than no source access at all) or whether the usage is disingenuous (trying to intentionally mislead by piggybacking on "aura" benefits of FOSS without it being actually FSF/OSI/SPDX/whathaveyou FOSS).

At the end of the day, in practice one is still going to look at the actual license file/SPDX code anyway.

† "Technically correct, the best kind of correct."

I hear what you are saying - language evolves, and we should evolve with it. I'm just not sure it's true in this case.

Open Source has a -legal- meaning - in the sense that Open Source Licenses are legal documents which specifically cover what can and can't be done.

Unfortunately the legal system does not just evolve terminology to suit whatever the current venicular is.

>> a) whether we can disambiguate between "public source"

The common phrase for this is "source available"

>> by irately pointing the discrepancy out we only come out as pedantic

When we allow words to change, when we allow misinterpretations of those words to proliferate, then we need to accept we are giving up the very freedoms those words set out to mean. If we just accept a new definition of Open Source today, then what's to stop the next generation of people/companies redefining it again in 10 years time? What happens when we start (colloquially) using the phrase to mean "the source is open inside the company, but not available outside it."

Unfortunately we see this language evolution around us all the time. "Free Speech" doesn't mean what most people think it means. Neither does "Constitutional Right". And evidently there's a group of technologists, or would-be-technologists (never mind joe public) who do not understand what Open Source means.

To you, defending the term becomes pedantry. But you live in a world where you have the access to code that you do, precisely because the older generation stood up for the specifics of the term - and fought for the very freedoms you now enjoy. You describe the corrections as "technically correct" without perhaps understanding the magnitude of effort that has gone into making it what it is.

So forgive us please if we hold tightly to what was so hard won.

Perhaps, and I mean this sincerely, rather than co-opting the past to suit your current needs, it's time for the current generation to fight for the ideals that -you- believe in. Just please, don't co-opt our hard-won terminology to do so.

> Open Source has a -legal- meaning

I don't think it does, but "open source software as defined by the Open Source Initiative" does have legal meaning.

Equally, "free software" does not have a legal meaning either, but "free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation" does.

That said, Stallman is probably right, the term "open source" cooked up by Perens et al was language used to mollify business people who feared the term "free software" (and "copyleft"... and Stallman). The term got traction and the popularity of the software greatly increased. But, by using this ambiguous phrase to describe software that you not only have the right to see the source of, but also to modify and redistribute, it opens the door to shysters who would try to claim that "source available" is somehow "open source"... because the "source" is "open".

There is no legal meaning behind and no legal protection for the term open source. A proprietary software license can use the term open source in the license and define it as the source code is available. Legal systems don't care about what some random organization like the OSI thinks open source stands for.

Which is why when a company releases a license that they claim is "Open Source" and it's not compatible with the OSI definition, then we need to stand up and say bullshit.

They are welcome to release it any way they like. If they think they can somehow fool developers by calling it Open Source when it isn't, well good for them. If you as a developer want to contribute to, and promote, their product then go for it.

But if it's not Open Source then I call bullshit, and don't be surprised when the -Open Source- community gets upset.

> The common phrase for this is "source available"

I know! Unfortunately that one doesn't seem to quite catch on beyond open source advocates (see my other nearby comment)

> Open Source has a -legal- meaning - in the sense that Open Source Licenses are legal documents which specifically cover what can and can't be done.

Does it? As in, is there any law-binding document that universally states what it means? Or has it been ruled anywhere what is or isn't open source? (respecting license terms may have been challenged, that as much is true, but that's about the license contents, not what is or isn't "open source")

I may very well be unaware of such a thing existing, and I would be glad to learn there is, but the FSF or OSI or the collective mindhive of hackers (in the jargon file sense; and not saying that derogatorily) or whatever saying "this is what Open Source is", while a powerful community statement, is not particularly law-binding. AIUI even among the proponents they even kind of disagree on what "open source" is and is not.

> "Free Speech" doesn't mean what most people think it means. Neither does "Constitutional Right".

These, comparatively, are legally defined.

> To you, defending the term becomes pedantry.

I didn't mean to imply that I was personally thinking it was pedantry, only that it can (and often is) perceived as such.

I am very much in favour of using proper terms, but I also recognise that it may not be as useful as one might think to fight the semantic fight in order to properly fight the value fight.

> So forgive us please if we hold tightly to what was so hard won.

Please, continue to hold tightly! Although sometimes one realises they can't ever hope to convince others they're "wrong", so maybe there are other ways to win... "You can't win, but there are alternatives to fighting."

As a believer in and advocate of FOSS, I found it much more effective to battle on the value grounds instead of losing the audience right away, instead reaching out into their level of understanding. More often than not, they end up educating themselves down the road. Kind of a "use the opponent's weight against them" move.

Open Source is a legal term in the sense that it becomes legal documents, licenses, and those licenses either conform to the OSI definition, or they do not. Sure, you can write anything you like in your license, you can call it Open Source, but if it's not compatible with the OSI definition then it's not compatible with the ideals and values of Open Source.

The problem with battling on value grounds, but abandoning the name, allows others to appropriate the name, and from that change the values.

I find it egregious that companies get to water down the values - they get to slowly shift perception of what "Open Source" is - and along the way the values get lost.

The values were written down. They got given a name. Now commercial interests want to appropriate the name, get the goodwill that comes with the name, but at the same time water down, remove, or alter, the underlying values.

I am no FOSS accolyte. My day job is commercial software. The (non-existent) financial model of OSS doesn't work for me. I am -very- happy that licenses of all kinds exist. I am free to choose what programs I use, and what licenses I choose to accept. I am largely a consumer of open source, and a very minor contributor.

It is as a -user- not a -developer- that I appreciate what Open Source (and Free) software mean, and I'm not ok with companies appropriating that term to mean "whatever they want".

In general, I agree with you. I am annoyed that people use "open source" instead of "source available". But I disagree with:

> But you live in a world where you have the access to code that you do, precisely because the older generation stood up for the specifics of the term - and fought for the very freedoms you now enjoy.

No, we have access to code because people fought for the "idea", not the word. Words are used to communicate ideas. The important thing is that people understand each other. Right now, the communication is muddled because the term "open source" can be interpreted by someone unfamiliar with the origin of the term as "source available". Yes, it sucks to lose the original term, but language does evolve.

> it's time for the current generation to fight for the ideals that -you- believe in.

I just don't see the value of the phrase that high. The important thing are the ideals behind it. If a new term needs to be adopted, so be it.

The company in the original post is watering down those ideals. But that's ok because "ideas"? By watering down the words they seek to water down the ideals.

Forgive me, but I don't think that's ok.

The problem is that companies like Microsoft created licenses that are semi-open to attract kudos. If the FOSS community changed “open” with “public” then Microsoft et al will then just move onto calling things like Reference Source License a “public source” license as well.

The only way around this problem is to play these organisations at their own game and trade mark any such public source term. But that’s going to be expensive to enforce, and who’s going to want to pay for the lawyers?

> The only way around this problem is to play these organisations at their own game and trade mark any such public source term. But that’s going to be expensive to enforce, and who’s going to want to pay for the lawyers?

Well, that's what the FSF and OSI are for.

Their funds aren’t limitless. They don’t even have the resources to fight a GPL violations. Never mind any new hypothetical responsibilities.

> The problem is that companies like Microsoft created licenses that are semi-open to attract kudos

That's the kind of move I squarely put under the "disingenuous" category.

> If the FOSS community changed “open” with “public”

That's not what I meant, what I meant is that the technically incorrect use of "open source" by MS&al would better be named "public source" / PSS. "source available" / SAS just doesn't have the same pattern/ring to it, which I presume is part of why it does not catch on.

The humble suggestion here kind of rides on the easily understood idea that making, say, a GitHub repo "public" doesn't make the code magically FOSS.

Then, by contrast with "public", "open source" gets a bit more of a specific meaning.

But the entire reason companies misuse “open source” is so that people are confused into thinking those companies are supporting FOSS by giving back to the community when in fact it’s all just marketing trickery.

> We can bicker on semantics all day long, if people at large continue using "open source" to mean "the source is openly visible" ("public source"?) we can't do much about it, and by irately pointing the discrepancy out we only come out as pedantic† to the point of appearing as "well, ackshually..." adversarial, which ends up being entirely counterproductive.

But...

> Language evolves

No, it doesn't. It's statically optimized.

> semantics shift

Again, wrong. There are no shifting in semantics.

> context matters.

Wrong. There is no such thing as context mattering. It's all about the textual matterment.

I love statically optimized language. It lets me assumptuate whatever I want, and you just have to affirm my matterment.

Especially when we harnest with licenses. No need to be semantical there.

It’s only confusing because companies like Microsoft intentionally abuse the term “open”.

I don’t really know what can be done about either. Because if the FOSS movement rally around a new term, you’ll then just see businesses who aren’t $OPEN_SYNONYM abuse that new term too just as they have with “open”.

Blaming the confusion on the FOSS community isn’t fair when the blame lays squarely at those who do intentionally misuse it.

> It’s only confusing because companies like Microsoft intentionally abuse the term “open”.

Not only, but perhaps indeed also.

"Open source" reads as two separate words rather than a multi-word expression. The "open" sounds like as in a book, a shop, a museum: there's no implication of being able to do more than merely look unless you pay.

There's also "open" in the sense of the open/closed principle in e.g. SOLID, but even as a developer that's not the first thing I think of.

This is the exact other half of what seems to annoy people here about LLMs being called "open source" when they can be freely modified into derivative works but the training set is unknown: "open" yes in this sense, "source" no.

The LLM weight dumps we see tend to fail the "open" part too, with fine print clauses saying things like non-commercial use only.

> If you'd never had the whole open software vs. free software debate,

how does one go through life as a software person and miss out on that formative experience? it's like saying you never heard of vegans.

Tangential to licensing, open source in the terms you’re describing is at the very least going to put into question any legal arguments about trade secrets.

who died and made OSI the sole authority?

Closed/Open, Free/Paid are orthogonal.

That's why a term called FOSS exists.

The fact that they coined and defined the term in relation to software in the first place, I'd say.

They had already lost control of the term by 1999 when they tried to trademark it:

https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

I'm not sure I understand the reasoning that "no trademark" == "no authority".

Taxonomists don't have a trademark on "Canis familiaris" but we tend to respect their opinion on what is or isn't a "Canis familiaris". If someone points to a dingo and tells me "that's a Canis familiaris", I say "it isn't, according to taxonomists" and they told me "who died and made taxonomists the sole authority" I would raise an eyebrow.

> who died and made OSI the sole authority?

I have often thought the same recently.

> That's why a term called FOSS exists.

And that is a key part of the problem: conflating FS (Free Software) with OS (Open Source) to give F(OS)S.

The thing is that Free software and Open Source _don't_ quite mean the same thing, but we treat them like they do. They are close but not identical.

Also see the recent kerfuffle about RHEL and CentOS.

Free software: do whatever you want with it, including sell it, but give your users the source code. The GPL is a FS license not an OS licence.

Not the world. Not open to all. The GPL 1/2/3 etc only says, clearly and distinctly, users. If you sell your free software, then it's only the customers that get the source, and that is 100% fine and OK.

OS is a different emphasis: it was designed to appeal to companies, businessmen and managers. You get the source, so we are giving you control, agency: you can't have it stolen from you.

But it was phrased in terms of sharing and openness.

That's what OS means, because the OSI says it is.

So BSL licenses say "you can have the source, and you can contribute back changes, but we still own it, and you can't use it in prod without paying or re-sell it."

That's a restriction of use. That's neither OS nor FS.

Whereas RH's use is 100% FS compliant but gets the OS folks annoyed.

But OS is not the same as FS. What RH is doing with RHEL is FS but not OS. It's not open to the world but the GPL never said it had to be.

I don't know what the best answer is here.

I wonder if it's time for a new term which leans on the English primary meaning of "free", as in at no cost, gratis.

"This software is free to get, free to use, and free to fork, but only so long as you do not charge for whatever purposes you employ it. If you obtain revenue from running it, supplying its output, modifying it, you sell products with it built in, or any other revenue-generating operation you must pay back X% of your revenues/profits/whatever to the creators. This also applies to downstream modified versions."

IANAL. A lawyer could do much better, I am completely sure. It might not be easy but I suspect that there is a way.

>> The thing is that Free software and Open Source _don't_ quite mean the same thing, but we treat them like they do. They are close but not identical.

I agree. They're mostly differ on the effect they have on the -rest- of your code.

>> Not the world. Not open to all. The GPL 1/2/3 etc only says, clearly and distinctly, users. If you sell your free software, then it's only the customers that get the source, and that is 100% fine and OK.

I read this into OSS licenses as well? ie Users not everyone.

> who died and made OSI the sole authority?

The people who "died" are all the dumb, short-sighted companies who use terms like "open source" when their software isn't.

We wouldn't be having this discussion if people would just stop being disingenuous. But no, that's not an option.

You can't trust a company saying they're "open source". That could mean next to nothing. So we look to the OSI and see what they have to say.

And completely non-legal devs stop trying to write software licenses. You talk to the average dev and they've no idea what a license grant is, the difference between copyright and licenses.

Which is fair enough, but any custom made license is extremely unlikely to be written in a way that it can be enforced when need....

I think the author would have been fine with a "source available" license that allowed them to contribute back the usual way (fork + PR).

>It's not Open Source. period.

Does the OSI own a trademark on the term "Open Source"?

They tried but USPTO declined to grant it. https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.p...

Afaict they do not, only terms like "OSI approved" are trademarked.

https://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines#Open_Source_Init...

why not call an OSI approved license “OSI approved license”?

Because 90% of people would have no idea what that means. Open source on the other hand is usually something many people have at least heard about or read somewhere.

Yeah The Reference Source License is a "source available" license. It's not "open source" in the OSI sense that it can be contributed to or used for any other purpose. For a security product, "source available" is MUCH better than nothing at all (closed, proprietary). Not sure why these people chose the Microsoft reference license for their product, but I guess if you are in a hurry and you need an example of a source available license then I'd also consider just grabbing one from a megacorp that probably had armies of lawyers go over it.

> Once he determined it was not an OSI approved license then that should be the end of it. It's not Open Source. period.

Where in OSI's "Open Source Definition" [1] does it say a license must be approved by OSI to be Open Source? If that was really part of the definition, they could have had a much shorter definition!

Another thing I find funny is that CC0 isn't "OSI approved" either, because of something about patents. But strangely, the "Definition" never mentions patents. But CC0 is not approved, so apparently CC0 is not open source.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd

Pretty much this. Using the term "open source" (rather than "shared source", "public source", or "source available") was a good faith mistake, and we fixed that once it was pointed out.

Beyond that, I'm not really sure what the purpose of this post is except to complain about the fact that commercial software exists.

I vaguely remember someone calling these kind of licenses open code or open access code instead of open source.

source available

When did people start taking "open source" as a label seriously? The term means nearly nothing in material terms about what you can actually do with the source code. Certainly if you can build a business off it without distributing the source it's not very useful and certainly not much more "open source" than throwing proprietary code on github.

>> When did people start taking "open source" as a label seriously?

In the late 90's.

>> The term means nearly nothing in material terms about what you can actually do with the source code.

correct. The term means nothing in and of itself. The license determines what you can do with the code. there are a bunch of licenses that conform to the OSI definition of Open Source. If a company claims to be "open source", but then does not fit the definition of Open Source then they should expect some push-back.

Sure, but the OSI does not have meaningful values. Why do you giving them credence?

Be that as it may, it’s still something to be aware of.

Enterprises typically care about the OSI definition of Open Source to the t, only allowing exceptions like Sqlite.

Enterprises also do not share values with the rest of humanity, so it makes sense they would support the concept of "open source" over actually free software

sqlite is public domain, how is that not OSI approved?

Public domain is not OSI approved. They also don't approve of CC0. It's an example of why the general, common sense definition of the term "FOSS" doesn't (and shouldn't, I believe) align with OSI's, but it doesn't matter most of the time, not to the average user or developer.

https://opensource.org/blog/public-domain-is-not-open-source

That’s weird, but I guess it makes sense since public domain isn’t valid in all countries.

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