Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

I'm willing to let OSI own "Open Source", cause why not (do they have a trademark on "Open Source"?), but not "open source". All-lowercase "open source" includes public domain, I don't care what OSI says about it, while "Open Source" is whatever OSI says it is, and if that does not include public domain then so be it.

View on HN

Capital letters are only useful as ECC, not direct signal. (You can't pronounce them, they aren't preserved in many contexts, the lay writer won't respect them, etc).

Your idea is like saying "Google" can be a trademark owned by Alphabet but "google" is just a verb. It seems like a cute linguistic hack but won't be meaningful in the public discourse.

> Capital letters are only useful as ECC, not direct signal. (You can't pronounce them, they aren't preserved in many contexts, the lay writer won't respect them, etc).

In speech I clarify if and when needed, naturally.

> Your idea is like saying "Google" can be a trademark owned by Alphabet but "google" is just a verb. It seems like a cute linguistic hack but won't be meaningful in the public discourse.

You have it exactly backwards. Descriptively "to google" is a verb.

Descriptivism is much better than prescriptivism in natural language. Sure, we need to use prescriptivism when teaching the language, but we do get to evolve the language. That's just how it goes and has gone for the entire recorded history of mankind.

Are you trying to subtly prescribe that descriptivism is better than prescriptivism? :)

A bit, yeah :)

Try pronouncing the word “Polish.”

Or helping your uncle Jack off a horse.

The Polish example only works because it's a different word, and yours only works because of implied but unwritten punctuation.

Neither is pronouncing a capital letter, whatever that means. It's why people have to say things like "capital P Political".

The fact that “Polish” and “polish” are different words is the whole point. The other commenter was saying capital letters aren’t signal, and yet.

The fact that it’s a different word makes it very different situation. It’s not the capital letter that signals this. It’s the context. Polish as a verb and Polish as a noun won’t be mistaken in a sentence. In “Polish my boots, please” we know it’s a verb, even though it starts with a capital letter. The capital letter does not ever signal meaning. That’s because a language is primarily spoken and there are no capital letters there.

Quite an interesting rabbit hole to explore. Apparently OSI holds a US trademark for “Open Source Initiative Approved License”, but no trademark for “open source” by itself.

Hardly surprising because the idiomatic usage of "open source" predates OSI.

Apparently not by a lot, but it does indeed.

The term definitely preceded the organization. The term was in use for years before OSI was formed. And OSI was clearly formed in order to provide some clarity to what was meant by “open source”. In other words, if there was no ambiguity in the phrase “open source”, OSI would never have been created.

And the best way to handle this ambiguity is to use "Open Source" when referring to OSI's definition, and "open source" when referring to the colloquial and ill-defined form.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com