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Comment by darby_nine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>> 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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